Team Member Tasha Bergson-Michelson Featured in School Library Journal

We’re delighted that our teammate Tasha Bergson-Michelson was featured in Adrienne Matteson’s School Library Journal article, “Teaching News Literacy? Check Your Own Bias, Says Librarian.” Some excerpts from the article:

If you are like me, the alarm about “fake news” reached a fever pitch in your librarian circles weeks ago … But what about the students who distrust the “mainstream media” and feel their views are more represented in sources you consider untrustworthy? How do we teach the skeptics to be critical thinkers and fact checkers, without alienating them by discounting their beliefs? …

Tasha Bergson-Michelson, a librarian at the Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA, has been digging into the question of how to teach young people to interrogate what they read, hear, and see. She doesn’t want her students to trust a source unless they have good reason to. Her 10th graders work through a unit on source evaluation that involves them coming up with a shared rubric for the standards by which they will judge whether a source is trustworthy or not. Her students use the standards they’ve identified to argue the validity of the sources they choose moving forward in the project. Bergson-Michelson wants her students to understand that all news sources have a perspective, but they can look through that perspective to assess whether or not the information provided is fact-based and trustworthy …

The best way to begin that cultural change is to face our own biases. Last spring, while Bergson-Michelson set out to teach her students about evaluating the news, she realized that she relied on the same handful of news sources, all of which leaned in one political direction. She sought credible sources from the other side of the aisle …

Her advice for reaching students who think differently than you: practice what you preach …

You can read the complete article here.

(By the way, author Addie Matteson is an alum of the U-M School of Information. Go Blue!)

About Kristin Fontichiaro

Kristin Fontichiaro is the principal investigator of this IMLS-funded project and a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.