In the age of online news and social media influencers, it can be difficult to determine which content creators to trust. Parents and teachers are finding it increasingly challenging to help young people stay informed about what’s going on in the world — while also ensuring they’re getting information from credible sources.
Inspired by this topic, three 91ֿ graduate students recently presented at the inaugural held Oct. 8-10 in Salt Lake City.
The idea for the session, "Is This Influencer Full of It? How to Help Students Navigate News from Content Creators," originated in a Teaching Media Literacy course the three took last spring, Peter Bobkowski, a professor in the School of Media and Journalism, told 91ֿ Today.
Bobkowski, who is also the school's Knight Chair in Scholastic Journalism, said the students examined news literacy resources currently used in K-12 classrooms.
“We noticed that the examples that are popular in news literacy teaching materials do not use influencer content,” Bobkowski said. “Since that’s where young people get their information, we figured that there would be interest in a session that showed how to adapt news literacy teaching resources to influencer/content creator content.”
Three students co-presented alongside Bobkowski: Blair Davis, a journalism teacher at Grand Oaks High School in Spring, Texas; Andrew Hoover, a video journalist at WFTV, an ABC affiliate in Orlando, Florida; and Jennifer Pignolet, an education reporter at The Detroit News.
They presented strategies for discerning online content and helping students seek credible sources.
“Now more than ever, we are inundated with information, and students and adults need the skills to be able to sift through it and find truth and context,” Pignolet said. “These skills must be developed early, not just in high school journalism classes. News literacy makes us better citizens in our democracy, better able to debate our beliefs and better able to push for change.”
Pignolet, Davis and Hoover are all pursuing the Master of Arts in Journalism Education, a fully online, asynchronous program.
The program, one of the few of its kind in the country, is geared toward teachers who want formal training in journalism, as well as news professionals interested in teaching journalism in postsecondary or secondary settings.
“This program has really helped me look at some of the work I do every day through a different lens,” Pignolet said. “It helps me think about how to break down what I'm doing to be able to teach it, not just do it. We had to do the same thing for this presentation, giving them a literal recipe they could follow to help discern if content is true.”
Students in the course live all over the country and come from a variety of professional backgrounds, Bobkowski said.
Davis, Hoover and Pignolet met in person for the first time at the conference, Bobkowski said.
“We had been meeting virtually every week over the last couple of months to put the session together so it felt like we knew each other pretty well before meeting in Salt Lake City,” Bobkowski said. “Online asynchronous education is convenient, especially for people from across different time zones. But there is nothing like being in the same physical space for building relationships and community with your peers.”
The students received overwhelmingly positive feedback about their session, Pignolet added.
“We had a packed house. The questions teachers asked were great,” she said. “They wanted to know about how to build healthy skepticism in students, not just cynicism that everything they will come across is untrue.”
The three-day conference, presented by the News Literacy Project, included sessions on digital literacy in the classroom, critical thinking, combating misinformation and multimedia journalism. Keynote speakers included Abby Cox, Utah’s first lady, and Pierre Thomas, chief justice correspondent at ABC News, among several other journalists and educators.
Attending the conference gave the students real-world professional development and allowed them to grow their network, Bobkowski added.
“I know that all three came away with new ideas for what they could try professionally, and with contacts for people who can inspire them and further connect them with like-minded individuals,” he said. “It was nice to see students talking about what they want to do once they finish their degree in reference to things that were happening at the conference.”
Pignolet, who’s spent nearly two decades working in local news, plans to use the experience and skills she’s learning in the graduate program to continue working with young people in some capacity in the future.
“I care deeply about helping grow the next generation of journalists, and making the industry a place they feel they can spend their careers,” Pignolet said. “I hope to be able to support student journalism programs as a professional journalist, and possibly teach on the side at some point.”
The students' attendance at the conference was supported with Bobkowski's Knight Chair in Scholastic Journalism funding, a Knight Foundation endowment in support of journalism education in K-12 schools.
