“Learning to Think Like Journalists: An Examination of the Teaching Practices of Journalists When Teaching Journalism and News Media Literacy,” will be presented by Michael A. Spikes, lecturer and director of Teach for Chicago Journalism, a program expanding scholastic journalism and news media literacy in the Chicago area at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Spikes is also a member of the Initiative for Media Education Inquiry and Action (IMEDIA), a program in the College of Media and the College of Education at the University of Illinois.

News media literacy (NML) is a subset of media literacy that uses the skills and knowledge of journalists as a lens for building critical thinking skills, with a focus on news media as a primary information source. While NML is taught by classroom teachers, much of its learning content is developed by journalists, being that their working knowledge forms much of the content that is utilized within NML pedagogy. Journalists are also called upon frequently to lead or assist in the teaching of NML skills, presumably because of their expertise. While NML and the associated broader field of media literacy education have become more prominent in recent years due to the proliferation of misinformation that is shared online,  literature on the pedagogy undertaken by journalist instructors is nascent. The current project addresses this gap in literature by presenting a descriptive qualitative case study of an out-of-school youth journalism training program to illustrate the teaching practices of journalists when tasked with teaching skills analogous to NML learning.

Sponsored by the Institute of Communications Research.