The National Association for Media Literacy Education held their annual conference remotely this summer. The conference offered a range of useful sessions for K-16 educators, community educators, librarians, and archivists. Our lab school partner, Marina Lombardo-Pisto, and I had the opportunity to present our unit focused on misinformation titled The War of the Worlds, Fake News, and Media Literacy that was developed in 2019.
This unit is geared toward grades 4-8 and offers multiple entry points into developing an understanding of media literacy around the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast and the study that focused on audience reaction. The unit includes a midpoint writing assessment, whole class capstone debate, and a final independent writing assessment. The audience study is the primary source document that serves as the springboard for making historical connections and learning how to consume and share information responsibly. The materials also convey to students that history is subjective and is constantly being evaluated and interpreted.
The attendees of our session were enthusiastic about the work and provided feedback for how the unit can be adopted for different settings. Several attendees remarked on how they were inspired by our multimodal approach to connecting students with the primary source material, while others appreciated that we were introducing media literacy skills to students in elementary settings. The group also discussed how the language around media literacy is always changing and the unit can constantly evolve to reflect that.
It was incredibly worthwhile connecting with media literacy professionals in a conference setting and we plan to stay connected with the NAMLE professional association. More than allowing us to share our work with a new audience, the session encouraged us to think through new ways of integrating media literacy standards into the work we do.