Abstract

While media has shown to disrupt those experiences that form the root of our humanity, particularly our human relationships, this article explores how media literacy and production can be tools to foster human connection and empathy. Exploring a case study of media literacy curriculum as civic engagement, this article offers an example of how media literacy and production were used in a high school travel immersion course to help students connect personally and contribute positively to the refugee crisis in Greece. In this case study, students embarked on media-making projects collaboratively with refugees, helping them understand the refugee experiences more deeply, and also offered empowering platforms for refugees to tell their own stories. This learning provided exposure to global issues, ethics, privacy, and agency, but most importantly, helped students use media tools in ways that promoted humanity instead of undermining it.

Keywords

Experiential Education, Humanity, Media-Making, Storytelling, Relationships

Teenagers today are often called “digital natives,” as they have been born into a world already filled with technology, the internet, social media, and smartphones. While some of us can nostalgically recall the times when our lives were analog, where plans were made and discussions were had in person, these habits are often unknown (or even unimaginable!) to young people today. Foundational habits of connection and communication that were developed over millennia are being eroded in less than one generation. Children today have access to more information and greater social networks than ever before in human history, and yet they lack the tools to navigate this native land. They’re finding themselves lost and disconnected and increasingly unable to navigate the analog world as well. Accordingly, it is our belief that a core component of today’s education must focus on how to (re)create human relationships that form the fundamental fabric of our society.

There is no shortage of research to indicate that media usage takes a negative toll on teen development. In terms of mental health, one such study notes that there is an increase in depression and anxiety for children who use social media for more than three hours per day (Riehm et al., 2019). There is wide speculation for why this might be, which includes conversations about how media has impacted (negatively) youth’s perceptions about body image, how it perpetuates feelings of exclusion, as well as how it can foster more proactively malicious behaviors, like online bullying. In addition to affecting mental health, media and technology are also changing fundamentally how and when we interact with one another.  According to a Pew report, more and more social interactions and core communications and experiences of teenage friendship are through online platforms. Teenagers today are meeting more people online, communicating with friends online, and “spending time together” online through messaging and gaming (Lenhart, 2015). This is a dramatic change: since the 1970s, youth who report spending time with their friends every day has dropped from 52% to 28% (Twenge, 2024). Media has fundamentally changed our human relationships and how we interact with one another, and more often than not, in-person interactions are being replaced by mediated ones. 

In our personal experiences as classroom teachers and parents, we see firsthand the way this plays out in our students’ lives.  When given unprogrammed free time, like before class starts or while waiting in line, students take out their phone immediately and opt to explore the digital world instead of striking up a conversation with the person next to them in the analog one. When they have a question for a parent or a teacher, they send a text message, even if that person is one room away. When they do not have access to their phones, you can see heightened levels of anxiety in their body language, presumably imagining that what is happening in their digital lives is of more interest and importance than what is happening with those with whom they are currently sharing space. We have seen again and again that technology often makes us less patient and less present, and our relationships suffer most of all.

Another study by Nesi et al. (2016) focuses on the erosion of teen romantic relationships in a climate of wide-spread media use, exploring how online communication inhibits the development of interpersonal competencies, like conflict management. While their research is on romantic relationships, it follows that the decline in interpersonal skills outside of the romantic sphere would similarly suffer. Our students are losing their ability to connect with each other meaningfully in person. Combine physically distant modes of communication with divides in what information we access through algorithms and filter bubbles (most notably written about in Pariser’s 2011 The Filter Bubble), and we increasingly are living a reality where forming relationships with anyone outside of our immediate social circles is both physically and ideologically challenging. 

Our technology has come to control our capacity to connect with one another, not the other way around. Aldous Huxley, in 1961 ‘In Conversation with John Morgan’ warned us of this future by saying that “the laws of [technology’s] being are not the same of our being” (BBC Archive, 2023, 0:01:07).  He goes on to explain that 

…man is being subjected to his own inventions, that he is now the victim of his own technology and the victim of his own applied science. Instead of being in control of it…this is the problem…I think this is perhaps one of the major problems of our time…how do we make use of this thing?…Technology was made for man and not man for technology. We have to start thinking about this problem very seriously. (BBC Archive, 2023, 0:01:30)

Huxley’s near-dystopian premonition is perhaps alarmist. As Douglas Rushkoff, explains in his seminal 2019 book Team Human: the evolution of media innovation was designed with positive intent “to create new intimacy… to bear witness… [to experience] our collective humanity.” Our media, he points out, is intended to be a “collective, participatory, and social landscape” (p.4). To this end, much of our technology was created to, and has the capacity to, create new social opportunities for humanity based on access and connection. Information has been democratized and made accessible in historically unprecedented ways. People can connect with others across the globe at unimaginable speeds. This can grow social movements and maintain connections in ways the analog world could never have dreamed. And yet, following Huxley, Rushkoff goes on to explain “Our institutions and technologies aren’t designed to extend our human nature, but to mitigate or repress it” (p.6). Consumer culture has taken over. Our algorithms have slowly encouraged us to become more predictable in our beliefs and actions. We are finding that, six decades after Huxley warned us, our systems are indeed eroding much of the humanity that should be at the core of society. Our media instead is often replacing human connection and creating more isolation. We are not with each other in person as much, which means we are not practiced in the base quality of human interaction, actually listening, and engaging with each other in dialogue. Algorithms show us what the systems think we want, rather than allowing us to talk to each other productively in ways that help us discover and grow our understanding of one another and connect with feelings of care and empathy. This reduces our curiosity about one another, because our systems proactively feed us answers and create conditions of affirmation and certainty, rather than expanding how we think and what we see. Rushkoff calls us throughout his manifesto to reassert our humanity, or to put it into Huxley’s words, to make sure we are making technology for us, not letting technology make us. We need to make sure we use media in ways that cultivate our humanity, specifically through collaboration, curiosity, and creativity instead of allowing it to quash those pro-human dispositions.

Civil society and healthy democratic institutions rely on productive conversations, which grow our shared understanding and shape our beliefs together, bringing in the ideas and opinions of many to form the strongest systems and policies we can. The stability and growth of our very world relies on these conversations and human relationships, and increasingly, our technologies have fundamentally changed them at best, replaced them at worst. Accordingly, the world of media literacy has to go beyond just accessing, analyzing, and evaluating information, and apply the same rigor to using media literacy to support human connections. This is why we have found that our work as teachers should continually ask how we are accessing, cultivating, and expanding human connection through media usage, making sure these systems work for us, rather than working against us? 

At the secondary level, we have adapted this premise and made self-reflection and human connection the core of our work as media literacy educators. We have previously shared some reflections on this work and our strides toward producing peace through media literacy education (2022). More recently, we have applied these core philosophies to experiential learning, which promotes civic engagement and the formation of relationships with those outside our community through a course called Storytelling for Social Justice. This course utilizes and celebrates traditional media literacy frameworks of analyzing and evaluating information, as well as media production assignments to boost creativity, critical thinking, and student action. Our goal, however, is not just to understand how to navigate the myriad of messages in modern media, but to understand and navigate ourselves and our human communities and use media as a tool to promote that humanity in ourselves and others.

Our curriculum includes three major content areas. First, we focus on storytelling as a practice and specifically the power and potential of stories for social change, with consideration to how we have shaped messages throughout history and what techniques we use to make our stories impactful. Next, we study the politics of the Greek refugee crisis, including issues and ethics of media representation of the crisis. Finally, we teach technical and creative media production skills, including photography, podcasting, and filmmaking. 

The academic learning is then put into practice in real-world experience in collaboration with Love Without Borders for Refugees in Need, a US and Greece-based non-profit for serves refugees predominantly from the Middle East and Africa. This organization “seeks to help support refugees in Greece regain stability and autonomy over their lives. Using art as a means for self-expression and a tool for economic independence, [their] work strives to give refugees a platform through which to express themselves, share their experiences, and forge relationships with both a local and global community” (Love Without Borders, n.d.). With refugees and aid workers, our students generated a variety of art and media projects, including running art workshops with refugee children, producing podcasts and documentaries about humanitarian work and the refugees’ experiences, and creating a magazine written from the student perspective to share with others what they have learned. Through this academic learning and lived experience, we aim for our students to develop a strong foundation of human connection.  We strive to create conditions to build empathy by both studying global affairs and using media as a tool for connection and understanding.

Media literacy starts with accessing and analyzing information for the purposes of greater (and accurate) understanding of human society, so this was our starting point as well. We set out by establishing an academic learning of a variety of topics to make sure that our students entered into experiential relationships from a place of knowledge and compassion.  This includes studying the conflicts that have led to the current refugee crisis (including wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cameroon). We also taught our students recent EU policies, like the Dublin agreement, in order for them to understand the current state of the crisis response in Europe. Students further learned about the asylum process and the work on the ground of how both international organizations and non-governmental organizations support refugees. Finally, students were given a range of media articles and asked to explore both the language and images used to understand how contemporary media on the crisis shapes what we know, what we believe, and how we react to the crisis.  

The culmination of this academic preparation was in a collaboratively produced magazine, where each student wrote one research article on a pertinent topic, for the purpose of sharing their knowledge with our own school community, in an act of community education. Students demonstrated their proficiency for analyzing and evaluating information, through the lens of making sure we had a well-rounded and nuanced understanding of the human issues we would be experiencing. This learning allowed students to enter their experiential learning from an informed perspective, while also practicing media-making as a tool for civic engagement and community activism. It further promoted informed curiosity, as we unsurprisingly found that as students learned about the refugee crisis, they grew more compassionate and curious, eager to learn more from the people impacted by it. This allowed them to enter into experiential relationships with an eager and open mind to understand what they did not yet know and could not learn in a textbook.

With this foundation of academic understanding and students primed with curiosity, our group of 15 students then embarked on a trip to Greece, to see and experience firsthand what had been introduced in the classroom. In addition to a range of activities that included art workshops for refugee children and shared meals to forge connections and create community, we also worked collaboratively with the director of Love Without Borders to identify media projects we could produce for the organization that would be advantageous for the NGO’s goals of global education. 

One such project was a podcast with three refugees who were eager to share (and record) their stories, hoping for others to understand their experiences more directly. Those being interviewed all spoke English fluently and therefore were able to communicate directly with our students. The objective of this exercise was to personify the refugee experience. Media may be the tool of acquisition, but the experience of receiving someone else’s story is completely human. First, one must sit in person with another and give themselves over to listening and learning. This act of active communion encourages perspective taking, which has been shown to produce greater levels of empathy (Cooke et al, 2018). Connecting with one’s empathy in the face of a massive global crisis can sometimes be a challenge. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, in 2022 there were over 12.4 million refugees in Europe. With a scale this large, it can be hard for students to grasp the enormity of the issue.  Stories help us see beyond the statistics to the human impact. “Personal stories,” as Dr. Emily Falk explains, from the perspective of psychology and neuroscience, “are more consistently processed in the regions of the brain that help us understand what other people think and feel than other non-narrative types of messages.” (2021) Hearing other peoples’ stories in the context of large social issues, according to Falk “can reduce defensiveness, teach complicated concepts, change individuals’ behaviors and promote social change” (2021). Not only was this an empathy building exercise for our students, as they connected on a personal level with refugees and got to know them as humans, it activated a more pressing and pronounced desire to change policy, as our students met and formed relationships with those impacted.

Creating stories together, for students, helps to cultivate habits of listening and curiosity. Instead of entering conversations with preconceived outcomes of what to expect, it is a lesson in really creating space for another person to share who they are and what they want others to know about them. To prepare students for this, we first spent time discussing and analyzing representation of refugees in the media. We discussed the famed and controversial media reporting on Alan Kurdi’s death and the ethics of “disaster reporting,” and promoted the idea for students that refugees have the right to tell their own stories, instead of being pigeon holed by the stories we tell about them, many of which group refugees into a monolithic category, and often one that is focused solely on tragedy and victimhood rather than their human identities and traits (Parater, 2018). In the case of the population with whom we work, many refugees wanted to share their journey as artists with us. Much of the work Love Without Borders for Refugees in Need is to create opportunities for the refugees to find tools for self-expression through art. Some of the refugees have art backgrounds, but many are finding art as a new skill during their time in Greece. The organization works by giving refugees art supplies and then hosts workshops where refugees can paint whatever they want. The organization then sells these paintings worldwide at educational art events, returning 100% of the profits from all sales back to the artists. 

When our students opened space for conversation, many refugees shared how they got into art, what art meant to them and what they wanted to express through art. Our students’ job was to promote and amplify the personal experiences of refugees, from the refugees themselves. Our students provided the tools and the production capacity, but the added dimension of civic engagement was their ability to use media to amplify another person’s story, and to provide these refugees with agency for how their own story and identity is constructed and shared.

Making media and making engaging media are different tasks, however. Further learning comes from considering the role of intentional choice in the final presentation of the media products. For the podcasts, students recorded over two hours of conversation, and while the goal was to amplify these refugee voices, our students still had the responsibility to make editorial choices in post-production. It was important to honor the story and style of the interview, to make sure they were staying true to someone else’s story, but the rules of engagement dictate that if these podcasts lost their audiences, they were not in fact amplifying anyone’s voice. Students therefore had a range of creative choices to make their podcasts engaging and impactful. Our students had to consider what to include, what to omit, how to structure and pace information for maximum impact, and whether sounds or music would enhance the message and tone. Invariably, there were hints of the student voices in their editorial choices, even when telling someone else’s story. This exercise required students to think critically and reflectively about themselves, about their interview subject, and about their shared relationship and vision for communication. Media, instead of inhibiting our connections with others, helped to promote collective exchange and self-reflection about relationships and our responsibilities to one another.

We often think of media literacy as an internal practice of managing the flow of information, making sure what we consume is accurate and fair, and that we are reflective about how we respond and act in relation to that information. This is, of course, a large part of it. But media literacy is not just about information, it is about relationships. In a time where media consumption is so vast, and communications takes place online so much of the time, helping equip students with tools to use media to form meaningful in-person connections is vital. Teaching students how to access and analyze information so that we are effectively informed about others is essential to promoting curiosity and compassion towards our fellow humans. Using media production to promote more in person sharing and storytelling helps to develop empathic connections and mutual understandings. And producing stories for sharing helps us think critically about who we are and what we want, who others are and what they want, and what our shared duties are to one another to pursue solidarity and respect. This is how we make sure we are making technology work for us, working to promote humanity, rather than being humans controlled by the technological ecosystems. 

We are lucky in our ability to escort students across the globe for this experience, but this work does not require transatlantic travel. We have programs at our school that implement this kind of work at the local level, for example having students hear stories from elderly residents at a local retirement community and then writing their memoirs as part of a literature project. Learning with this population provides similar opportunities as the curriculum above, by creating opportunities for our students to use media as the mechanism through which we build relationships with others, grow our mutual understanding, and amplify voices to promote greater care for one another. It doesn’t matter where you do it, what matters is that by using story and media literacy education, we can offer a path to help students learn how to use media as a tool for collaboration and connection, promoting human relationships and connection, rather than succumbing to the distance, distraction, and disagreement media culture often promotes. 

Six decades ago, Huxley claimed we were already living in a dystopian future where humans were now working for technology and applied science, rather than having it working for us. When asked in which countries this was true, he responded “this is not so much…a question of national peculiarities, or even entirely of political peculiarities” (BBC Archive, 2023, 0:0:30). The stakes are high. Our relationship with media and technology is a global issue, but of most note, it is a human issue. Huxley’s command, as he sets forward for us, is to “reestablish control over our own inventions” (0:02:20). Media literacy as a discipline is the response to this call for action. But to fully realize this, we must reorient our focus as a discipline away from purely navigating information and towards how we can connect with each other in person to restore our social habits and relationships. Media is just a tool, and we humans are the active agents using it. Media literacy, therefore, is not really about the media, it is about us. And teaching this to teenagers is more important than ever.

References

Baldi, Meredith & Prescott S. (2022). ““Producing Peace”: The Possibilities and Limits of Using Media Literacy to Foster Student Agency.” The Journal of Media Literacy, Research Symposium Issue. https://ic4ml.org/journal-article/producing-peace-the-possibilities-and-limits-of-using-media-literacy-to-foster-student-agency/

BBC Archive (1961). Aldous Huxley on the power of TECHNOLOGY! | In Conversation | Classic Interviews | BBC Archive [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCOGFSwrGNc

Cooke, A. N., Bazzini, D. G., Curtin, L. A., & Emery, L. J. (2018). Empathic understanding: Benefits of perspective-taking and facial mimicry instructions are mediated by self-other overlap. Motivation and Emotion, 42(3), 446–457. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9671-9 

Falk, E. (2021). Op-ed: why storytelling is an important tool for social change. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-06-27/stories-brain-science-memory-social-change. 

Lenhart, A. (2015). Teens, technology and Friendships. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/08/06/teens-technology-and-friendships/ 

Love Without Borders (n.d.).  About Us. https://lovewithoutborders4refugees.com/aboutus/ 

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Parater, L. (2018). Refugees are not the crisis. It’s the narratives we tell about them. UNHCR Innovation. https://www.unhcr.org/innovation/refugees-are-not-the-crisis-its-the-narratives-we-tell-about-them/ 

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: How the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. Penguin Books. 

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Twenge, J. (2024, May 8). Teens have less face time with their friends – and are lonelier than ever. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-their-friends-and-are-lonelier-than-ever-113240#:~:text=In%20the%20late%201970s%2C%2052,was%20especially%20pronounced%20after%202010