Making Media Literacy Fun

When I first was introduced to the concept of media literacy, it was by reviewing an article written by the KKK.

I was in junior college and one of the guest lecturers for that day had come in with two separate articles. No details about the articles were given, just the plane text on the background of the website they had been presented on. The lecturer then asked us what was wrong with these two examples.

I remember one was stilted. Something felt a bit off, but I, in my beginnings of my journey in literature and media literacy, couldn't quite place what. The other article was a bit harder to understand. The language was a lot harder to grasp. But there was a difference I could remember. Both sited their sources, but one set of sources sounded ... wrong.

But at first glance? If you weren't educated in the area? (And by and large I think the American education system certainly could use improvement.) Nothing really shot up alarm bells.

At the time.

Because I didn't know what I was looking for.

And then the lecturer started his lecturer and explained the difference. One article was peer reviewed, written by historians about Martin Luther King Jr. And the other? The other was written on a website hosted by the KKK.

This shook things up a bit, to say the least.

But it got me started on media literacy. It got me noticing the game in being smart on the internet and in academic fields in general. Often, things can sound just a bit off. And if you just take it at face value, you'll wind up passing on bad information.

Later, I went on to teach media literacy. Its importance, in my mind, just grew and grew as I got older. Particularly 2016 and onward, which was around the time I started learning about media literacy myself. The fact that 'adults' and people in power could just say things and be wrong was startling to me. And I'd parrot things I thought sounded kinda right, but might be a bit stilted on closer inspection.

So when I became a teacher, I came from some poorly done experience. I knew that I was entering a field where I thought I could spot the lie and then walked right into it.

I found myself thinking back to that first lecture and the feeling of something off. And that we were then taught the tools of the game. To 'spot the wrong.' And I took that idea and I went why not make it bigger? Why not make media literacy this game of detective, where we find out why something sounds off and why something isn't right. Put the power back in the hands of the reader. Don't make them feel like they are constantly censoring themselves because they don't know what is right. Start them off with the tools to look at a piece of information and hear that niggle, that tiny voice of 'something is off' as a much louder alarm bell.

I came up with a game. And I want to make it larger. It's a scavenger hunt around media literacy. A spot-the-difference that has anyone looking at two sets of resources and going 'here's how I know this is wrong.'

I want to share that research with others. The ability to listen to a conference on neurodiversity and see only one citation in a presentation and go 'hang on, that doesn't seem quite right for such bold claims.' And then I want people to go out and find out why. To learn to listen to the voice in their head going 'no, that's not right' and find out what science is behind it. What does the research and the history say. And also who is footing the bill for the research and which company has stakes in the history.

By making a game, where people feel like detectives digging for the answer of a crime, it feels like there's some end goal to reach, rather than just assuming all pieces are false. I want to build up a person's sense of 'wrong' so that they do not have to be right 100% of the time, but rather that they can be right a lot of the time and the rest they are able to catch themself afterward and go 'that wasn't right then, because I didn't have all the clues in the crime.'

I want to make media literacy fun. Put a feeling of accomplishment into a generation that might not have had the same tools that I did. I want to see this going forward.