Unit
Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age
Help students become informed and effective civic participants in today's digital landscape. This unit is designed to develop students' critical thinking, news literacy, civic engagement, and social-emotional skills and competencies.
Resources
11Duration
Multiple weeksSubject
- Civics & Citizenship
- History
- Social Studies
Grade
9–12Language
English — USPublished
About This Unit
On the afternoon of August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot to death in a confrontation with Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, MO. Within a week, the shooting became a flashpoint for a national discussion about race, policing, and justice in the United States.
Using Ferguson as a case study, students will explore the media coverage and the protests that followed—driven to a large degree by social media—and learn to become informed and effective civic participants in today’s digital landscape.
Essential Questions
What is the role of journalism in a democratic society, and how can we become responsible consumers and producers of news and information in the digital age?
Learning Goals
- Investigate the choices and challenges facing journalists as they report on a story, including the importance of verification, sourcing, and other journalistic practices and standards.
- Understand the role that confirmation bias, stereotyping, and other cognitive biases plays in how we interpret events, news, and information.
- Explore the impact of social media on the traditional news cycle, and understand the role it can play in influencing public opinion and the press.
- Develop critical thinking and news literacy skills to help students find reliable information to make decisions, take action, and responsibly share news through social media.
- Consider their role as citizens in a democracy and their responsibilities as civic participants and citizen watchdogs.
A Note to Teachers
Before you teach this lesson, please review the following guidance to tailor this lesson to your students’ contexts and needs.
Preparing Students for Difficult Conversations
Students establish a safe space for holding sensitive conversations, before introducing the events surrounding Ferguson, by acknowledging people's complicated feelings about race and creating a classroom contract.
The Impact of Identity
Students explore how identity impacts our responses to other people and events by examining a cartoon and analyzing an opinion poll from a week after Ferguson.
Confirmation and Other Biases
Students define explicit, implicit, and confirmation bias, and examine why people sometimes maintain their beliefs in the face of contradictory information.
How Journalists Minimize Bias
Students experience the challenges to reporting objectively by writing a news piece and watching a video about how journalists counteract bias in the newsroom.
Verifying Breaking News
Students evaluate the differences among news accounts about Ferguson, develop strategies for verifying news and information, and understand the challenges facing journalists as they cover complex, fast-moving events.
Social Media and Ferguson
Students explore the role of social media in Ferguson, apply information verification strategies to social media posts, and develop strategies for becoming critical consumers and sharers of social media.
The Power of Images
Students examine how identity and biases can impact how individuals interpret images and experience the challenge of selecting images to represent news events, particularly connected to sensitive issues.
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown
Students explore the potential negative impact of images through the social media protest #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and develop a decision-making process for choosing imagery to represent controversial events.
The Importance of a Free Press
Students review the First Amendment, understand the importance of a free press, and consider how that freedom can conflict with other societal needs through journalists’ experiences in Ferguson.
Hands Up, Don't Shoot!
Students review the US Department of Justice report, revisit how confirmation bias impacts our understanding of events, and consider how to bridge the gap in understanding that often surrounds events like Ferguson.
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This unit was created in partnership with the News Literacy Project.
The News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan education nonprofit building a national movement to create a more news-literate America. NLP is the nation’s leading provider of news literacy education.
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