“(Mis)Information Creation as a Process”: A Method for Teaching Critical Media Literacy

In January 2019, I taught a condensed credit-bearing media literacy course for undergraduates based on the ACRL Frame, “Information Creation as Process”. My main learning objective was to teach students to recognize accurate information, misinformation, and disinformation in the news and on social media, not by naming them as such, but by: 1) exposing students to the process through which news goes from field observations to a published or broadcast story, and 2) exploring current social and cognitive psychology research on how humans evaluate whether to believe the information they consume. The course ended with a discussion of healthy information consumption habits. I incorporated guest-speaker presentations and field trips, in which students interacted with practitioners and researchers in the fields of journalism, politics, and psychology. For a final project, students each created a media product exploring a topic of their choice related to misinformation and disinformation in news media.