{"id":10091,"date":"2018-07-10T12:11:31","date_gmt":"2018-07-10T12:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media.am\/in-a-fake-news-world-museums-are-uniquely-positioned-to-provide-media-literacy-and-education\/"},"modified":"2018-07-10T12:11:31","modified_gmt":"2018-07-10T12:11:31","slug":"in-a-fake-news-world-museums-are-uniquely-positioned-to-provide-media-literacy-and-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/viewpoint\/2018\/07\/10\/10091\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIn a fake news world, museums are uniquely positioned to provide media literacy and education\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barbara McCormack is the vice president of NewseumED<\/a>, the education arm of Newseum<\/a>, an interactive museum in Washington, D.C., that aims to \u201cincrease public understanding of the importance of a free press and the First Amendment\u201d to the US Constitution. NewseumED provides free learning tools and resources on media literacy tools to supplement the school curriculum. Barbara sees NewseumED\u2019s role as one that supports teachers and believes museums are uniquely positioned to provide such media literacy and education.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cFolks have lost trust in media, in some NGOs, and in our press, but museums, overall, are trusted because we\u2019re not political and we do research, before putting out our training programs. So this is why the Newseum is making this huge effort to help train the general public,\u201d she said during her talk at the Tvapatum Media Conference<\/a> last month.<\/em><\/p>\n

While in Yerevan, Barbara met with Media.am briefly to discuss why media literacy training is important \u2014 especially these days in a fake news world \u2014 and the role museums play in engaging the public.<\/em><\/p>\n

What do you see as museums\u2019 role in media literacy?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We see our role as supporting teachers so they have standards of learning. They have topics they have to teach in the classroom, so we create free resources to help them meet those standards and reach children, and we do it around media literacy, history, and the First Amendment. So it\u2019s just supporting teachers with free resources.<\/p>\n

The role of a lot of museums is to support the education community. Teachers have limited funding, access to resources, and limited time to create their own resources, so it\u2019s our job to meet teachers where they\u2019re at, where they\u2019re teaching. To understand what they\u2019re charged with teaching and then help give them the tools to do that in the classroom.<\/p>\n

What are some of the tools and resources you provide?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We could offer a class, for example: we do it on site, online, or we go out into the community. We create lesson plans. We have primary sources. Teachers, especially those teaching media literacy, need access to primary sources, but because of copyright laws they can\u2019t always get their hands on those, so we work through donors to get the rights to use these for teachers for free and then I put them on my website. So that\u2019s our role. To give them lesson plans, classes, primary resources, videos \u2014 we create videos, we use our artefacts, put it all online and make it free or teach them onsite at the museum. <\/p>\n

Teachers [in the US] have been teaching forms of media literacy for 30 years. Some librarians do it, some teachers build it into their curriculum. What\u2019s changed though is the digital literacy, the medium, the platforms. Information literacy, finding reliable information is not new, and library services have always been focused on that. News literacy is not new, but there\u2019s more emphasis on it now because of the technology used to deliver and deceive news.<\/p>\n

What happens when governments and companies (like Facebook and Twitter) intervene and try to fight fake news \u2014 what might be the negative consequences? Where do you see the legal and ethical conflict between freedom of speech and fake news?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The First Amendment protects good information and bad information. And that\u2019s where there are lines. First Amendment protects hate speech. That\u2019s a line a lot of folks have trouble understanding. I\u2019m a First Amendment purist, and so I would like to protect those rights. Because I have those rights doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m going out and spewing hateful things. But we protect those in order to protect good speech that people might want to silence because it\u2019s speech they don\u2019t agree with. And I think that comes from an informed citizenry. <\/p>\n

Whenever someone decides for you what\u2019s good and what\u2019s bad, we have a problem. Someone else is making that decision. So I would love to see consumers be able to make their own decisions. Not all consumers are as thoughtful as others, we know this, but maybe through more training, more workshops, more discussions, people will start thinking and be more open to other ideas. And not just their points of view. I hope so. But if we don\u2019t train the consumer, who makes the decision? Who\u2019s the right person to make the decision? I think it\u2019s a fine line, and I don\u2019t think our governments should make those decisions. I think they should help regulate tech companies to be more transparent. So through regulation I\u2019d like to see transparency requirements so consumers can figure out what they\u2019re looking at, how information is coming to them, but not \u201cyou can say this and you can\u2019t say that.\u201d That\u2019s what I\u2019d like to not see. But I\u2019d like consumers to be smart too, and be responsible with this right. <\/p>\n

What, in your opinion, is the best model of engaging the public? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think there\u2019s one way. I think you need a toolbox of approaches because different people are going to appeal to different techniques. Games, real-life case studies \u2014 we like to take a real-life controversial case study and then discuss it. And peel back the layers and have a respectful conversation and model how that can be done. And show how important it is to get to real facts, and stay away from emotion and have your discussions. So you need all sorts of tools. And you need to meet people where they are. So if they\u2019re on their device and that\u2019s where you can send information, then we need to meet them on their device. Or in the classroom. Or in a library program. Or in a museum discussion. We need to do it in multiple places and through multiple deliveries. For example, we know video is king; everybody loves the video. So wherever you find people. <\/p>\n

You do need to talk some process, especially with younger children as you\u2019re laying the foundation for critical thinking, but then you do need, as Paul [Mihailidis, associate professor of Civic Media & Journalism at Emerson College and Tvapatum\u2019s keynote speaker] points out, the why. Why is it important? And then maybe we can create the empathy, the understanding. Just like travel. Why do we travel around the world? It\u2019s to understand, see, and experience firsthand other people. It\u2019s the why. It\u2019s important. <\/p>\n

At the Newseum, our focus is protecting the values of the First Amendment (which protects freedom of press, religion, assembly, petition, and speech). Without solid media literacy training all of those basic values and freedoms are threatened. This is the why behind media literacy training. We can\u2019t have these crucial conversations that impact our world, these important social issues, if we don\u2019t have the same set of facts that we\u2019re working from. So this is why.<\/p>\n

Interview by Adrineh Der-Boghossian <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barbara McCormack is the vice president of NewseumED, the education arm of Newseum, an interactive museum in Washington, D.C., that aims to \u201cincrease public understanding of the importance of a free press and the First Amendment\u201d to the US Constitution. NewseumED provides free learning tools and resources on media literacy tools to supplement the school Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10089,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-viewpoint","author_posts-adrineh-der-boghossian"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}