|Washington Post reporters DeNeen Brown and Tom Hamburger speak to high school students at an NLP-Washington Post Young Journalists Development Program summer workshop.
Photos by Billy Bird.
Students Learn News Literacy and Digital Skills in Summer Workshops
The News Literacy Project staff conducted a series of innovative workshops this summer for high school students in San Jose, Calif., San Antonio, Texas, and Washington, D.C.
In the second year of a partnership with the American Library Association, NLP oversaw two-week “News Know-how” sessions for teens at San Jose’s Educational Park Library and at the San Antonio Central Library.
Participants received instruction in news literacy and the use of the library’s information resources. Local journalists also lent their expertise to the workshops.
The teens then worked in small groups on projects designed to reflect their knowledge and to teach news literacy concepts to others. They learned digital skills and incorporated video, audio and written content into their projects, which they presented publicly at the conclusion of the workshop.
The projects included a “Fact or Fail” quiz that put “too good to be true” advertisements through a process to check them out, an examination of the dangers journalists face in other countries, and a board game that tests players’ knowledge of news literacy.
Examples of the teens’ projects can be seen here.
In a preliminary report, evaluators from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne said that after completing the workshops, students were more likely to agree that “quality journalism provides the benchmark against which all other sources of news should be measured” and that “the First Amendment is vital to American democracy.''
The teens also reported that they were more comfortable using a computer, searching the Internet, editing videos and/or photos, vetting news sources for quality of news and distinguishing fact from opinion.
“Even my smartest friends pass around information and I don’t know why they would think it is good information,” said workshop participant Elise Chen, 17, a senior at Independence High School in San Jose. “Even the smartest people are susceptible to getting misinformation or information that is not in the right context.”
For the third consecutive summer, NLP also did a series of workshops in partnership with The Washington Post’s Young Journalists Development Program.
Students representing nearly three dozen high schools from Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia attended one of two Saturday sessions at the Post, where they learned news literacy basics and engaged with Post reporters Matea Gold, Chris Richards, Tom Hamburger and DeNeen Brown.
In a post-workshop assessment, 30 students rated the sessions as "extremely valuable" and the other 20 said they were “somewhat valuable." Among the most important things they said they learned was the need to verify information and check sources, the students said.