This week, our Newspapers in Education feature was written by me.
Students reading The Odessan last year as part of the NIE program. Our program is 17 years old — and media has obviously changed a lot since it began.
The features typically include fiction and nonfiction serial stories, civics information and historical information about Odessa in a set of stories called “Grandma Lucy.” Fifth-graders at Odessa Upper Elementary and Wellington-Napoleon Elementary, as well as a classroom of seventh-graders at Odessa Middle School, are each given a newspaper each week at school so they can read these features as well as learn about other aspects of the newspaper.
The program is as old as my column — 17 years old, 18 in August. For a little perspective, we started pagination — the process of creating pages on a computer, rather than a board with a wax machine — the same year our NIE program began. Facebook didn’t exist yet.
The NIE feature I created on knowing good sources from bad ones.
So obviously, what we need to teach students about news has changed drastically in that time. Honestly, I think a significant number of adults haven’t been able to keep up with how much has changed in that time.
A slide from the presentation I’ll give at the OHS Career Skills Day Thursday.
At the beginning of the year, I asked Odessa’s curriculum director which grades are learning about how to know a good news source from a bad one. She was as shocked as I was to learn that while a few different classes do a little, in a student’s entire time in the district, they might not ever be taught this. The percentage of the class getting this as a real lesson might be lower than half.
This isn’t to knock Odessa — it isn’t a unique problem. It isn’t included, at any age, in the Missouri Learning Standards, which is what schools in the state use to build their curriculum. But all students need to know this as a life skill, not just those who are in a journalism or honors English class.
Going out into the world, as students become young people who vote and make daily decisions, they need to know how to learn about the world around them. They need to know what they can believe online, and to think through what they should in turn be promoting.
By catching students in fifth grade, we’re getting them before they have their own social media profiles. That means they’ll know more by the time they are online at that level. But it also means more information is needed at the high school level.
This week, I’m participating with the Odessa Chamber of Commerce in a student development day for OHS seniors. I’m presenting on social media and networking, in a presentation that also includes soft skills and interviewing. That means I don’t have a lot of time to spend on the topic, but I do think it’s important, so it has a slide in the presentation.
In the coming years, you’ll see more of this as I look for ways to help students understand more about the news (my next target is to help them identify what is news and what is opinion when it isn’t marked as clearly as it is in our paper). It’s just one way we can make sure students are learning to be responsible citizens.