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Marquette Students Honing Noses for News

By Maureen Kelleher on Monday, October 19, 2009

With help from the News Literacy Project, 150 Marquette Elementary School sixth graders are honing their noses for news, learning to sift out the facts from the opinion, advertising and even fiction they encounter in the endless stream of information available through television, Internet, radio and print.

Marquette social studies teacher Courtney Rogers and NLP’s Chicago coordinator Peter Adams are leading the students at one of the five schools in LISC's Elev8 program through two weeks of learning how to determine what news to believe.

Students are exploring other basic questions about news, new media and their role in a democracy: Why does news matter? Why is First Amendment protection of free speech so vital to American democracy? What challenges and opportunities do the Internet and digital media create?

The News Literacy Project is an innovative national educational program that is mobilizing seasoned journalists to help middle school and high school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age. The project’s primary aim is to teach students the critical thinking skills they need to be smarter and more frequent consumers and creators of credible information across all media and platforms.

Students are learning how to distinguish verified information from raw messages, spin, gossip and opinion and are being encouraged to seek news and information that will make them well-informed citizens and voters. The curriculum is flexible and it scales well” from middle to high school, said Adams.

At the end of the sequence students will produce projects to demonstrate their new knowledge. Other middle and high school students involved with the News Literacy Project have created board games, short videos and posterboards.

The Marquette students geared up for an October 20 visit from Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, who will visit in the midst of the process, giving the youth time to whet their appetites to ask questions about the news business.

At Marquette, Adams said students are entering the project with a broad range of prior knowledge about news. While some already understand the basics of how a newspaper works and even understand complex terms like transparency as they relate to news, others are much more naïve.

“It’s a mix,” he said. “There are students who have never really thought about this.”

During a recent class, students transitioned from examining advertising to reading a news article about the Naperville teen who died of swine flu. When asked why that story was placed where it was in the paper, “some students were tempted to say, ‘oh, her family probably paid to have it put there,’ ” said Adams. “It was a good misguided comment because it opened up the discussion.”

The partnership with Marquette is NLP’s first venture in Chicago. Former Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Miller founded the News Literacy Project in 2008, after speaking to his daughter’s middle school class about how journalism works.

NLP has already worked with schools in Bethesda, Maryland, and New York City. Adams says NLP hopes to expand to more Elev8 schools, possibly as early as winter 2010. “It fits with the Elev8 model. All the principals and directors were excited about the program.”