Building a Bridge to Somewhere: A Critical Dialogue to Further Media and Information Literacy Practice

Abstract

News, media, and information literacy scholars agree that collaborative approaches to education are far more beneficial to learners than the siloed and fragmented approaches that have often characterized the field. However, discussions about the benefits of collaborations, especially across disciplines, are few and far between. If news media literacy education is to become more integrated and less fragmented, a solid understanding of how collaboration can benefit practitioners and learners is paramount. This article will draw on conversations between a librarian, a media literacy practitioner, and a media studies scholar, on ways our iterative teaching and research projects have pushed us to reimagine how we design, deliver, and assess news media literacy education. Through a joint critical reflection, we will discuss how our teaching praxis has evolved, and how this benefits our work in media education as we collectively rethink news media literacy research and practice. Our collaboration has led us to wrestle with some big questions, which we consistently ask of ourselves and our disciplines and which we include here: Who should be driving educational content, students/participants or instructional designers or both? Whose voices should be centered? How do we ensure that our approach is inclusive and critical? How do we determine what constitutes news media literacy? Through this conversation, we hope to contribute to a growing movement in the field that aims to bridge research and practice across disciplines and co-create a more nuanced and holistic approach to news media literacy education.

Keywords

News Media Literacy, Critical Media and Information Literacy, Collaborative Learning, Interdisciplinary Practices

Introduction

One of our first publications started with the line, “A media studies professor, a media literacy expert, and their subject librarian walk into a bar. Well, actually, a classroom”  (Rosenbaum et al., 2021, p. 154). While meant in jest, this line captured our first attempt at navigating the silos that have long characterized the fields of media, information, and news literacy. Collaboration within and between fields has been difficult, and challenges inherent to joint media literacy efforts are not new; in 2004, former MIT scholar Henry Jenkins wrote about Bob McCannon’s analysis that “when media literacy educators get together, they always circle the wagons and shoot in” (Jenkins, 2004). The fact that twenty years later, we were asked to write about how our collaboration came together and how this kind of cross-disciplinary partnership can help the field is a sign that media literacy education has come a long way, and that there is still much work to do.

Collaboration has been recognized as essential to the success of news media literacy (e.g., Milhailidis & Thevenin, 2013). Scholars have showcased examples, such as partnerships between instructors in schools (e.g., Brown, 1998), between experts in various kinds of literacies, such as media and information literacy (Brayton & Casey, 2019; Kymes, 2011), and cross-disciplinary collaborations between news media literacy and other disciplines like psychology (Bulger & Davidson, 2018). Despite this generally accepted understanding, little scholarship has closely examined what this collaboration might look like and how it could transform media, information, and news literacy practices.    

In this article, we aim to address what this collaboration may look like, how it can evolve, and how it can and has, in our case, informed and enhanced our perspectives on news media and information literacy, as well as our practices associated with teaching about these topics. 

Uniting varying approaches to news media literacy

The media studies professor (Judith), subject librarian (Jen), and media literacy expert (Alan) came to the collaboration with different perspectives on the theories and pedagogical practices involved in teaching media, information, and news literacies. Essential to the success of our collaboration has been recognizing our individual understandings, identifying where commonalities and differences lay, and working toward a shared approach to teaching and learning that affirms difference and builds on each other’s strengths.

Our initial programmatic efforts, first designed by Jen and Judith (before Alan joined the University of Maine), were informed by the inoculation approach coupled with the deficit perspective (Bonnet & Rosenbaum, 2020). The inoculation approach argues that media literacy is necessary because people need to be protected from the potentially negative influences that the media can have on unknowing citizens. In other words, an intervention will help people resist bad information or ideas. The deficit perspective holds that media literacy provides people with information that they did not previously have, but need in order to participate successfully in contemporary society. Together, these approaches have been informing the field of media literacy for decades (Brown, 1998; McGuire, 1964, Jeong et al., 2012; Kubey, 1997). Media literacy is thus seen as a skill set (the ability to critically assess and evaluate media content) (NAMLE, n.d.) that comes from a foundation of knowledge about how media content is created, disseminated, and could potentially influence its users (e.g., Rosenbaum et al., 2008). Drawing on this perspective, scholars have attempted to quantify media literacy, developing assessment measures that allow both for perfect scores and zeros (Ashley, et al., 2013; Maksl, et al., 2015; Tamboer et al., 2022).

The fraught 2016 election brought Judith and Jen together to address palpable interest across University of Maine’s campus in navigating what was variously being called ‘fake news’, disinformation, or a post-truth era. Our shared approach to designing a fake news workshop for interested undergraduate students involved an active learning approach aimed at empowering participants with tools and strategies to resist and/or actively work against mis/dis/false information (i.e., the deficit-driven approach mentioned above). Judith’s experience studying and teaching media literacy and Jen’s background in information science meant that both came from a pragmatic, applied approach to teaching and learning. Judith’s teaching practice was informed by models of media literacy (e.g., Potter, 2004; Rosenbaum et al., 2008) and assumptions about student knowledge and skills based on demographics and previous exposure to media literacy instruction. Jen’s approach to teaching emphasized active student engagement in learning, and was informed by emerging models of critical information literacy and socially relevant programming (Drabinski & Tewell, 2019). For Jen and Judith, the goal of media literacy workshops and classes typically focused on addressing and overcoming a lack of knowledge or skills, and was often driven by a combination of research, theory, and/or social issues. Their approach showed clear overlaps among media and information literacy, specifically in their goals of facilitating discovery, assessment, and ethical engagement with information.

In 2019, Alan entered University of Maine’s PhD program in Ccommunications, as Judith’s advisee, and brought with him a rich background in media production and media literacy education based in critical theory and activist-oriented education. Given that Jen was similarly engaged in critical information literacy (CIL) (Drabinski & Tewell, 2019) – with its focus on the “sociopolitical dimensions of information and the production of knowledge” (p. 1) – Jen, Alan, and Judith began to work together. Conversations soon centered on the overlap between CIL and critical media literacy, particularly in the realms of knowledge production, power dynamics, and considerations of who has voice and agency in whose stories are told/heard/shared, and how critical literacies could and should inform media literacy education efforts (Drabinski & Tewell, 2019; Brayton & Casey, 2019). Together, the (now) three of us began reworking our programming to include Alan’s insider view of news media production as well as more critical approaches to news media literacy education that moved beyond ‘fake news’ and into a critical media and information literacy (CMIL) framework. This framework focuses on training learners in “the importance of being an active, rather than passive, participant in one’s learning, and questioning the power structures responsible for the production and distribution of information.” (Rosenbaum et al., 2021, p. 6; cf. Berry et al., 2021).

Collaborating across fields: learning from each other

Collaboration involves hard work, but also comes with rewards in the form of continued learning. After four years of working together, we have learned a number of important lessons. One of the key takeaways from our collaboration has been the importance of ongoing dialogue in our lesson plan design as well as our research efforts. Co-planning, co-writing, and co-assessing has become the norm for our team. We will commonly work on a lesson plan or an article outline together, at the same time, in a shared document, where we can track each other’s progress, ask questions, and deliberate about our decisions as we make them. For us, collaboration is only effective if we truly work together to develop ideas and turn them into practical output. In this sense, the pandemic, with the mandatory shift to Zoom meetings, facilitated our collaboration as it allowed us to work together across distances and time zones. We also recognize the importance of pilot testing our ideas and learning from successes and failures: each programmatic effort comes with the expectation that we will have to adjust it in future iterations, and we inevitably learn from each evolution.

Our individual approaches to news media literacy have evolved, thanks to our collaboration. Jen’s understanding of theories of communication and social engagement phenomena and how these inform how people engage with information increased as a result of her collaboration with Judith and Alan, as did her ability to integrate communication theory into our media literacy workshops. Judith has grown to understand the importance of student agency in improving one’s media literacy, seeing that while instructors can provide students with tools to learn and put concepts into practice, students must be intrinsically motivated to use them. This, in turn, has implications for how we design and encourage student participation and how we center student experiences. Alan has learned to see the importance of news media literacy education providing learners with the opportunity to develop practical and purposeful strategies for dealing with the glut of (mis)information and for developing and exercising healthy media and information habits.

Defining a collaborative approach to news media literacy

As a result of our years-long collaboration, our shared understanding of news media literacy has evolved as well. Despite recent literature that considers how to define news media literacy (e.g., Tamboer et al., 2023; Vraga et al., 2021), it is still undertheorized. Co-teaching and co-researching has led us to consider questions like what is the news, whose news is it, who is the news made for, and who chooses what’s newsworthy? News literacy seems to have been mostly focused on teaching people how to discern “fake” from real news, recognizing biases in news stories, and understanding what factors determine how news is made (e.g., Adjin-Tettey, 2022; boyd, 2017). Media literacy, on the other hand, focuses on the development of knowledge and skills around all forms of media, utilizing the core competencies of “access, evaluate, analyze, and create” (NAMLE, n.d.), while news media literacy combines these efforts to address the core media literacy competencies through the specific medium of news and its unique forms and practices.

In our work, we have begun to realize that many learners, especially those who receive media, news, and/or information literacy education through their school, already possess these competencies. Thus, our collaboration has further centered the importance of systems-thinking, which focuses on learning how to recognize patterns and relationships “that shape society and organize structures, institutions, and ways of thinking” (Share & Beach, 2022). For news media literacy, this involves ways that culture, people, and organizations shape how the news is constructed and for whom.

The three of us now also view an awareness of self and one’s positionality as a more helpful lens in training engaged and critical citizens than solely working from a checklist detailing things people must understand or know how to do. This new perspective has grown from an analysis of a news media literacy program we conducted that demonstrated that although participants did not show statistically significant growth on the quantifiable measures we used in our study, they did make intellectual gains, which were revealed in the open-ended reflection questions in our analysis. Participants developed news media perspectives that were “less reductive, less normative, more introspective, and less centered on ‘should’ statements regarding what comprises ‘real news’ and how other news consumers ‘should’ engage with news media” (Rosenbaum et al., 2022, p. 14). This finding helped us realize that reflexivity and self-awareness are central components of news media literacy; who am I and how does that shape my view of the world around me, and who are you and how does that shape your view of the world around you. In other words, empathy is a vital component of news media literacy education (Ashley, 2018; Mihailidis, 2018). Recent developments in the media landscape, accompanied by the popularity of social media in acquiring news and information, mean that the news often serves as a platform to reflect what we already believe; news media literacy should teach people how to break from this or at least be aware of it and have the critical tools to address it. This view connects closely to NAMLE’s emergent core principles of media literacy education, which emphasize critical inquiry, empowerment, and reflexivity (NAMLE, n.d.).

In practice, this means that we have started to reconsider the role that objectivity plays in teaching news media literacy. Most news literacy programs focus on objectivity as a desirable outcome of the news, albeit a standard that the news does not always achieve. We have found, however, that exploring objectivity as a process is far more valuable: in other words, examining how we come to an assessment of something as objective or not, investigating the factors (both in the news and ourselves) that impact that assessment, and then using that to understand our own responses to particular news stories – news stories that are subjectively constructed and subjectively interpreted. In our own assessment of news media literacy learning, for example, we found that, after participants engaged in our news media literacy program that emphasized the various systems that impact news production, discussions of objectivity and “neutrality” as an ideal became less prevalent in their considerations of journalism (Rosenbaum et al., 2022).

Evolving approaches to teaching and assessing news media literacy

Through our collaborative efforts designing and assessing educational materials, our approach to teaching and assessing news media literacy has shifted as well. When we reflected on what we had learned from four years of collaboration, all three of us noted the importance of co-constructing lesson content with our student participants/fellow learners. In her reflection, Jen spoke about meeting program participants where they are and in ways that resonate with them (with a focus on responsive, flexible instruction), rather than adhering to a top-down approach to curricular content creation. Judith also wrote about the importance of putting students in charge of their own learning through student-led discovery. Additionally, Alan reflected on the importance of considering the ever-changing relationships and dynamics between audiences and media, shifting understandings of what constitutes news in the digital age, and the influence of a highly-polarized media landscape on trust and (dis)engagement with the news media.

The earlier in-person workshops organized by Jen and Judith initially centered on concepts related to fake news, and later, when Alan came on board, on news media literacy more broadly. In these workshops, we approached news media from the perspective of a traditional print/broadcast environment (and its online analog); however, our students were not familiar with, or necessarily interested in, that space as a starting point. This approach revealed to us some problematic assumptions we were making about what news students “should” be focusing on/interested in and the subsequent need to better tailor workshops to how students understand, experience, and use news media.

At the same time, these workshops provided helpful insights into the importance of centering student voices. In every iteration of these workshops, students were provided opportunities to act like a news creator, to design headlines and select accompanying photos that told a story for a particular outlet and audience (Berry et al., 2021). Even these seemingly small agentic acts made for purposeful, thoughtful discussions about those choices and where pressures/constraints, and opportunities, might lie. We saw a spark that would, in later versions of our workshops, make it clear that our instruction would benefit from the inclusion of student voices and input on the workshop content itself and of a less top-down, deficit-based approach that may not speak to learners’ interests, experiences, questions, or areas for growth.

When the pandemic necessitated a move to an online, asynchronous environment for our news media literacy programming, this allowed us to flesh out additional content over the course of five days (rather than during one,1.5 hour workshop). This format gave us the opportunity to take a more critical approach to learning and teaching: We were able to go deeper into what comprises the news and the myriad influences (and pressures) on news creators, and facilitate shared learning by presenting learners with open discussion boards that facilitated a reflexive practice, allowing participants to share content and ideas, as well as react and respond to one another.

In addition, while face-to-face workshops had been more informal (and packed in terms of time), making formal post-workshop assessment difficult, this online environment offered the perfect opportunity to assess the effectiveness of our work. Initially, we intended to assess the effectiveness of this online workshop using a quantitative survey alone (Ashley et al., 2013; Maksl et al., 2015), as this would, we believed, allow us to see changes in knowledge and skills. However, we decided to add several qualitative questions, to glean a deeper understanding of participants’ learning and experience with the program’s content and delivery. As discussed above, this assessment showed us the importance of using mixed methods to assess the effectiveness of news media literacy workshops: While scores on the quantitative measures were high both pre- and post-workshop, showing no discernible difference in news media literacy learning, the qualitative data revealed that the workshop had actually increased people’s critical and reflexive understanding beyond what the quantitative instruments could measure (Rosenbaum et al., 2022).

It is in this vein that we have realized how much more we could and should do to facilitate a participatory, student-centered, and/or co-learning approach, by providing opportunities to co-construct workshop content and assessment with students/participants, and positioning ourselves as both teacher and learner in the classroom (which we may have considered but not made explicit through the design and implementation of our workshops).

Moving forward: tackling some of the big questions

Throughout our collaboration, we have been faced with a number of questions about media and information literacy (MIL), questions that we regularly return to and grapple with, given what we learned from studying the potential impact of several collaboratively designed MIL workshops and training. Below we present some initial answers to these questions.

Who should be driving educational content, e.g., students/participants or instructional designers or both?

This is a difficult question; as instructors and researchers in the field of news media literacy, we believe we have something to bring to the table. At the same time, we have plenty to learn and a surfeit of opportunities for growth. A starting point for all of us is that we recognize our dual roles as learners and teachers, and that the key to effective teaching is to be willing to listen, share space, reconsider and reflect on our learning, grow, and respond. While being vulnerable in one’s pedagogy is never easy for anyone trained as an instructor, we see it as a fundamental aspect of successful teaching.

Furthermore, from our experience with news media literacy programming and assessment, we have learned that combining students’ interests with our knowledge of media production and consumption, wherever possible, is a beneficial starting point for a more engaged, enriching experience. After all, who better to help drive content than those who have a stake in the outcomes and an interest in what will be considered/navigated/facilitated? As instructors, we try (and need) to consider how to share power with others (students, participants) in the choices that shape our instructional offerings. In other words, the focus should be on how instructors and participants can meaningfully co-construct the learning process.

Whose voices should be centered? How do we ensure that our approach is inclusive and critical?

Understanding and learning how to negotiate and challenge power relationships within society is central to critical pedagogies (Giroux, 2020), such as CMIL. As we design courses around traditional MIL competencies – access, analyze, evaluate, create – or as we integrate new competencies – critical inquiry, self awareness and reflexivity, empathy, action – we have to consider not only how we address those relationships of power from a news media literacy perspective, but also how teaching and learning may reinforce those relationships. In other words, decentering the instructors’ voices and centering those of the learners is not just part of a successful pedagogy, it’s also inexorably linked to teaching news media literacy. At the same time, we work to ensure that our approach is as inclusive as possible and reflects voices that might not be present or prolific in the classroom, including voices from different ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, socioeconomic experiences, and other groups that are underrepresented on our campus, a predominantly white institution.

Centering the learners’ experiences means utilizing a dynamic syllabus that is informed and (re)shaped by regular opportunities for learner feedback and input. In addition, it means engaging in teaching and learning practices that prioritize self-reflection and problem-posing, as well as empathy. This can take the form of activities where learners are asked to reflect on their learning through writing activities or are asked to take on perspectives of people not like them when solving a problem (Berry et al., 2021; Rosenbaum et al., 2021). This creates a listen-dialogue-action cycle that takes the instructor out of the equation and instead lets the learners drive the class. Finally, we aspire to multiple points and perspectives of assessment that are flexible and iterative, i.e., that do not necessarily focus on deficits, what learners do not know, but on assets, what are they bringing to the learning and what are they taking away (Rosenbaum et al., 2022).

As mentioned above, and discussed in more detail below, the goal of news media literacy education, as we have learned to see it, is not just the acquisition of specialized knowledge and the development of specific skills, but building from and moving beyond basic news media literacy knowledge and skills to develop reflexive and self-aware practices and to problematize how the power relations in society shape the media content with which we engage on a daily basis. If we, as educators, are to share power with learners and engage in a co-learning model of news media literacy education, then we need to (re)think about whose voices are centered and amplified in the design, delivery, content, and assessment of the course. And if the classroom does not start by acknowledging (and working to deconstruct and reimagine) the power relations inherent in the learning process itself, then our efforts could potentially reinforce those same power relations (Freire, 1970).

How can news media literacy reconcile different approaches to media, news, and information literacies? 

In the last decade, the emergence of social media and the panic over “fake news” and the spread of mis/disinformation, in addition to declining public trust in news media organizations and the further diffusion and polarization of news content and audiences, has increased the demand and supply for news literacy interventions and research (Jones-Jang et al., 2021). This spotlight has provided a significant platform for raising awareness and resources for news literacy efforts globally. However, the dominance of news literacy in the public discourse, particularly in regard to fake news, has potentially created a problem for larger media literacy efforts, in that the discourse has rendered news literacy and media literacy synonymous, creating a narrow perception of media literacy education, and placing news literacy within a false binary of real news versus fake news. This reduces media literacy approaches to critically engaging with news media in favor of journalism education approaches (Rosenbaum et al., 2021).

Defining news literacy has been problematic since its inception. Some scholars view news literacy as a subset of media literacy, with the aim of critically engaging with the specific medium of news through a traditional media literacy framework – access, evaluate, analyze, create – while other scholars view news literacy as a fundamental approach to journalism education, with the aims of inculcating knowledge and appreciation of journalism processes and credible news media (Fleming, 2014; Jolly, 2014). Still other scholars approach news literacy as an extension of information literacy, the ability to find, evaluate, and ethically use information (Wuyckens et al., 2022). While these distinctions have theoretical and practical implications for news literacy education and research, most scholars recognize the unique and prominent role of news media in the lives of individuals and communities and its unique function within society and politics, and thus the necessity of news literacy education for empowering an informed and engaged citizenry (Malik et al., 2013).

As we have detailed, our process of collaboration and iteration has shown how media literacy,  information literacy, and critical approaches to pedagogy can be combined into a more comprehensive framework for examining news, one that is characterized by a student-centered, systems-thinking approach. Given our backgrounds and interests, this framework demonstrates our view of news as a natural medium for the integration of media and information literacies, and “media” and “information” as convergent concepts in the digital age (Rosenbaum et al., 2021). Further, due to our co-evolution of thinking and practice, we work toward a CMIL approach to news media literacy education, which aims to empower active learners to be critical, reflexive, empathic, and purposeful participants in their media and information environments (Brayton & Casey, 2019).

Conclusion

If we were to rely on a turn of phrase to capture our work together, it would be that we are more than the sum of our parts. This is evident in the programs we create, which are richer, more engaging, and more transdisciplinary because of our partnership. As a result, we are also initializing a co-learning praxis that is an exciting new frontier, full of potential and challenges. Similarly, we are developing and implementing empathy in the ways we understand and assess student learning, as well as engage in our own learning and teaching.

Beyond the benefits that this collaboration has provided to our understanding of news media literacy and the learners who have made their way through our workshops, collaborations like ours are key to advancing the individual fields of news, media, and information literacy. Our collaboration has shown that approaching teaching and learning about news media with perspectives and tools gleaned from all three fields is effective as well as empowering. Our collaboration has shown that CMIL should not be seen as something entirely separate from news, media, or information literacy, but that it can and should complement the practices that come out of those three fields. As evidenced by our work, this kind of interdisciplinary approach allows for a more robust practice that better serves and empowers both learners and educators.

Our collaboration illustrates that it is possible to break down the silos that characterize much of academia and produce new and useful insights. At the same time, collaborating across fields is not without its challenges. There were a number of occasions, for example, when we found ourselves using the same terms (e.g., “critical” and “information”) but meaning different things. In addition, reconciling the disparate terminology used across silos in this article alone took long discussions. Focusing on fake news as a central concept allowed us to initially avoid conversations about complex concepts such as “news” and “critical,” but those discussions became unavoidable as we grew in our teaching practices and chose to write about our experiences. If nothing else, our collaboration revealed the myriad of (at times poorly-defined) terms and ideas used across the various approaches and frameworks (e.g., news, media, information, digital literacy, critical media literacy). Overcoming these challenges meant lots of long co-writing sessions that were often interspersed with lengthy conversations about single sentences or even a single word, patience, as well as a good sense of humor.

In short, while never easy, collaboration is a worthwhile effort for advancing how we approach educating new (and older) generations of media users.

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