News Literacy: The Keys to Combating Fake News

The focus on fake news, "alternative facts," and general media mendacity distracts us from a very real educational challenge: teaching students the skills and dispositions to become careful and thorough researchers. This is hard work, and there are no easy recipes to facilitate the process. However, in our new book, News Literacy: The Key to Combating Fake News, we demonstrate the degree to which carefully scaffolded lessons that nurture students to become increasingly savvy inquirers, readers, and writers, librarians and content area educators can help students meet those challenges and become informed, active citizens.

In this critical information environment, we must remember the librarian's role: to collect, preserve, organize, and disseminate (CPOD) information. While we continue to be called upon for these purposes, we propose that the role of the K-12 librarian is a little different. We are educators, after all. Thus, it is incumbent upon us to fuel inquiry, nurture empathy, promote curiosity, foster skepticism, and empower innovation, while also teaching students to be savvy consumers of the information they seek and receive. The tools change. Our instructional strategies change. But our learning objectives are constant, whether teaching news literacy, promoting independent reading, or leading a maker project.

A component of the role of the school librarian is as an advocate for the library program and the inclusion of information literacy skill practice in the curricula of various departments. Research is a process, and, sadly, students often get through high school without practicing and learning it. They frequently approach research tasks knowing what they "want to say"—and then find resources that support their point of view. This is bias confirmation.

In News Literacy, we underscore how teaching students to navigate the research process—by shifting their search strategies and resource types from reference to more granular publications such as scholarly research, statistical data, and primary sources—will help students master the critical thinking skills required to sniff out manipulative information and untruths. Content teachers and librarians need to focus on teaching students to recognize what a text creator's bias is and how or whether that bias negates the usefulness of that source for the student's purpose. In essence, students need to learn to engage with varying bias and points of view, not avoid them. To that end, we believe that it is essential that students become skilled at critically examining the information they encounter in order to be valid creators of new information and participants in global discourse.