WILBRAHAM — Students of the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District will soon be given the tools to critically analyze the news and media with a $30,000 grant for a three-year fellowship program with the News Literacy Project.
The News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works with teachers, school districts, states and community partners to “ensure students in all 50 states receive news literacy instruction before they graduate high school,” according to the project’s press release.
The fellowship itself will give the district customized support to integrate news literacy education, “ensuring all students learn to think critically about news and information,” the press release said. The resources are completely free for any educator and the grant money can be used at the district’s discretion.
Superintendent John Provost said Dr. Georgina Trebbe, the district’s licensed school library teacher, was “instrumental in developing the grant application. He added that $10,000 will be used annually for three years to support news literacy education in K-12 and educators will begin by reviewing standards and skills from the News Literacy Project, before integrating them into the curriculum and classroom instruction.
“It is important to teach students to distinguish between standards-based journalism and other types of information so they can become empowered consumers of media,” Provost said. “The internet has democratized communication, making it possible for anyone to reach a large audience. While there are many benefits to this, it requires information consumers to become more discerning, to filter out what is factual from misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.”
News Literacy Project’s Senior Director of Media Relations Christina Velga said the project has found that teens who had exposure to media literacy instruction were “more likely to engage in civic minded activities, such as pushing back against misinformation and correctly identifying AI generated images.”
“They reported higher trust in news media, more active news habits and were more likely to actually consume the news,” Velga said. “There’s a number of other study findings that we didn’t do. Similarly, they find that even short lessons on newsletters and instruction can help kids better identify credible sources, use fact checking skills, that sort of thing.”
Director of District Fellowships Brittney Smith, who will be working with and supporting the HWRSD during the program, said it’s important for students to have these sets of skills to help “navigate our complex information landscape.”
“We’re being bombarded with information at every turn,” Smith said. “It is really valuable for students to have these skills and kind of be ready to whip them out as they are surfing the net using TikTok, Instagram, other types of social media. News literacy ties directly to reading comprehension skills tested on national assessments … independent evaluations have shown that 88% of students could recognize when a social media post failed to provide credible evidence, which was a gain of 20% from before students took the lessons.”
She added that the program’s most recent research showed that the “majority of teens view the news media negatively.”
“Half of teens said journalists do more to harm democracy than to prevent it,” Smith said. “Seven out of 10 thought that news organizations intentionally add bias to coverage to advance a specific perspective.”
She added that information from the surveyed teens “overwhelmingly” showed that they want media literacy instruction and the set of skills to understand it better, citing the fellowship as “responding to their desire to learn how to navigate news and other information.”
Velga said that districts are opting into this fellowship because they are seeing students struggle to make sense of information they see online.
“It’s our goal that every student will learn and use literacy skills before they graduate,” Velga said. “The reality is that it’s not a requirement in most places and even despite that, teachers are saying ‘this is so important, we are going to add this to our plates to figure out how to incorporate this into what we are teaching kids because they need these skills.’ Educators are responding to a need they see, and we have this program to support them and show other districts that you can do it too … kids say they want it, we know from our own research, and we know that it really has an impact on them.”
