A Society on the Verge of Moral Collapse: The Necessity of Critical Media Literacies

It is the year 2030. The web’s capabilities for quick, easy, and widely accessible online publishing has led to the proliferation of fake news and misinformation, and increasingly vocal support for unrestricted freedom of speech. Legislation requiring educators to present opposing viewpoints on all issues started with Texas’s House Bill 3979, which was designed and passed with the intention of limiting how race-related subjects were taught in public school classrooms (Lopez, 2021). Similar laws were adopted across the United States and then in Canada’s right-leaning, conservative provinces. Lawmakers argued that opposing viewpoints on all issues, including debated and controversial issues, were required to be presented “without giving deference to any one perspective” (Relating to the Social Studies Curriculum in Public Schools, 2021). 

Canadian and American K-12 teachers were faced with two options. They could avoid mention or discussion of any issue considered to be debatable or controversial in their lessons and classroom resources. Or, they could teach opposing viewpoints behind horrors and atrocities such as slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust. Those who chose to stand against these legislative directives were warned that they would face disciplinary action or even job loss. Educators feared the consequences of giving further voice to those preaching racism, discrimination, and hatred, but in an economy ravaged by the impact of COVID-19, those who did not have the financial freedom to speak up were put in an impossible position. 

Teachers, schools, and districts were facing immense pressure from parents seemingly polarized on all issues. Compounding the problem was the continued spread of misinformation on social media platforms. For years, Jenkins (2009) and other scholars in the field of learning and technology had highlighted the importance of teaching critical media literacies. Educators, and especially those with a digitally-focused teaching philosophy, recognized the necessity of integrating critical media literacies in all subject and curricular areas in order to prepare students to be first, informed and second, vocal citizens. However, with powerful entities influencing government actions and policies, these same educators feared that action taken in the classroom was too little, too late to address the issues in a society on the verge of moral collapse. 

References

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. MIT Press.

Lopez, B. (2021, October 15). The law that prompted a school administrator to call for an “opposing” perspective on the Holocaust is causing confusion across Texas. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/15/Texas-critical-race-theory-law-confuses-educators/ 

Relating to the Social Studies Curriculum in Public Schools, Texas H.B. 3979, 87th Leg. (2021). https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB3979/2021 

Want-To-Read List

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Alvermann, D. E. (2017). Social media texts and critical inquiry in a post-factual era. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 61(3), 335–338. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.694 

Bonnet, J. L., & Rosenbaum, J. E. (2020). “Fake news,” misinformation, and political bias: Teaching news literacy in the 21st century. Communication Teacher, 34(2), 103–108. 

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Scheufele, D. A., & Krause, N. M. (2019). Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(16), 7662–7669. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805871115 

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