by Courtney Pentland, October 2020

A long row boat skates over the water and a colossal whale just under the surface. Imagine sharing that moment at sea with the largest mammal on the planet. It's an amazing site…almost too amazing to be true. When I encountered this image, that's what I thought. But, I didn't take the time to fact check; I just moved on. According to snopes.com, it was too good to be true (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blue-whale-under-rowboat/).

Our students will encounter altered images more and more throughout their lifetimes. Knowing how to critically engage with these images will help them in their personal and professional lives. While the falseness of the boat and whale image may be relatively harmless, learning to effectively evaluate images is a key skill—and one that can be easily overlooked in an already full curriculum.

The Changing Landscape of Media Literacy

October is National Information Literacy Month, and a focus on practicing these skills is incredibly important for our students, ourselves, and our nation right now. While I feel like my lessons in evaluating text-based resources are pretty solid, I learned that the same could not be said for lessons on evaluating images. I was out of the school library for a few years serving in a district level position, and in that intervening time, the way students engage with information changed dramatically. Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat were in their infancy when I was at my previous high school, and they were not places students ventured. However, since that time, students have moved from Facebook, to Twitter, to Instagram, to Snapchat, to TikTok. Who knows what the next big platform will be?

As such, engaging critically with information, images, and videos is a skill that must be learned and continually practiced. As technologies advance and change, it is important for us to update and keep our evaluation skills sharp. Social media is now the place where most people encounter news and information, which has increased our interactions with images and videos. You no longer have to be an expert at Photoshop to make alterations to images, as there are many apps available that even young children can use. A favorite app I had on my iPhone was called Waterlogue, which took regular photos and turned them into watercolor images almost instantly. A friend of mine has an elementary-age son who loves to use a filter to change selfies to include animal ears or background graphics. Another friend took a photo of our children and used a program to make it look like an image from a superhero comic in mere minutes.

Because it is so easy to change an original image, knowing how to spot changes is important, but it is also important to understand the reason for alterations. School librarians are the natural leaders for implementing information literacy lessons, as this is part of their school library training and a focus of the American Association of School Librarians Standards Framework for Learners. Learning how to engage with information, in all forms, should begin in elementary school and continue on into post-secondary experiences.

Adjusting Approaches to Media Literacy

I've already taught lessons this year to my high school and graduate students on the skills of vertical and lateral reading which focus on the importance of learning about a source from its own perspective as well as the perspectives of others (for example, read the "About" section of a website, but also do a search to see what others have to say about that person/organization/content). I have been really impressed with what my students have found out about the authors of articles they are reading—they dug deeper than I anticipated, looking at the authors' educational and work history as well as other publications. You can learn much more about teaching lateral reading on the Stanford History Education Group's (SHEG) Civic Online Reasoning site (https://cor.stanford.edu/curriculum/collections/teaching-lateral-reading/).

As I transitioned back into teaching in the library, I realized that I needed to adjust the way I taught information literacy. It wasn't until I taught the Common Sense Media lesson, "Is Seeing Believing?" (https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship/lesson/is-seeing-believing) with my 3rd graders last fall, which focuses on why images are altered, that I consciously realized the benefit of teaching image evaluation. Again, I was amazed at how nuanced their responses were to a question on why someone would digitally alter the inside of a lemon to look like each section was a different color. Why not use an original image of a lemon with food coloring injected into each section? They responded with rationales about making the picture grab the reader's attention, or to make the results of the experiment look better with more definition between sections, or to make the colors brighter and therefore prettier.

Curriculum Connections across the Grades

Elements of that Common Sense media activity show up in the elementary lesson this month, "Introduction to Engaging with Images." Here, I worked to craft an approach that would act as a building block for the secondary lesson created by Emily Jacobs for Lincoln Public Schools (LPS), "Digital Resources and Tools: Reading Photos Laterally."

The focus of elementary lessons should be on building a foundation of knowledge so that deeper conversations can happen. In this case, it is important for elementary students to know that images can be altered and the reasons why (not all of which are nefarious), which can lead to discussions in later grades of the implications of those alterations and how to read laterally to spot changes.

One of the things that librarians do best is use their resources, and Emily and I both looked to experts in the field as we crafted our lessons. Emily used the skill of lateral reading from SHEG in her secondary lesson, in relation to learning more about an image. She also took cues from the February 2019 issue of School Library Journal (Vol 65 #1), as well as several sessions from the American Association of School Librarians conference in November 2019 in Louisville, KY. The LibGuide that Emily created for Lincoln Public Schools about Evaluating Online Information (https://lms.lps.libguides.com/evaluatingonlineinfo/home) includes a host of additional resources. Many are available to anyone, though some are only accessible by LPS employees.

Evaluating images online came back on my radar this spring as I was attending a wide range of webinars to help inform my practice. The News Literacy Project provided a series of news literacy webinars in May 2020 (https://newslit.org/updates/introducing-nlps-may-news-literacy-webinar-series/) that included what it means to be news literate, how to explore the misinformation landscape, digital verification, and understanding bias. Through those webinars, I learned more about what images are most frequently altered and some of the skills needed to evaluate online images. The News Literacy Project is offering similar sessions in October 2020 (https://newslit.org/updates/fall-news-literacy-professional-development-series/), if you'd like to join. I kept some of the concepts from these learning sessions in mind as I thought about the elementary lesson this month.

There are many, many sources for you to use as you craft your own information literacy lessons. Hopefully, the two lessons included this month can be added to your toolbox as you work with your students on evaluating images they encounter for academic research or in life outside the classroom.