Also known as La Casa Erie, Chicago’s Erie House received a McCormick Foundation grant last year to help fund a news literacy curriculum created by four teen interns for out-of-school teen participants.

 

The interns wrote and piloted their curriculum, based on Stony Brook University’s News Literacy course, to integrate into Erie House’s Youth Options Unlimited (YOU) program. We asked Riza Falk, Erie House’s youth digital media coordinator, about the new program. Here’s what she had to say:

We understand the strategy is to infuse news literacy into the YOU program. Describe the program and how news literacy is being integrated into it.

RF: YOU serves youth ages 12 to 18, and our main focus is academic. We have a mentoring program, homework time every day and a multimedia program I teach. We’ve held news literacy classes the past two summers. The interns have written a curriculum of six after school-oriented lessons, so it’s not as dry as many lessons we looked at before. The summer of 2013 they piloted it with high school and middle school youth. They revised it and taught it again this summer.

It’s one component of a larger academic program. We’ve had lots of ideas of how to incorporate it; we’d like to do parent-student workshops, introducing the parents to news literacy along with their kids. A lot of our parents are non-native English speakers. A lot are immigrants.

Photos by Riza Falk

 

What challenges have you faced in year one and how did you address them?

RF: The interns got a crash course in news literacy. None of them are teachers so it was trying to figure it out as we go along. This summer we were doing it a whole lot better.  We were testing out the curriculum, seeing how kids felt about it and revising it. This summer the interns were a lot more comfortable and the kids said it was a lot more fun.

How are you measuring progress?

RF: We did pre- and post-tests last year. This summer we did a pre- and post-test but we also added an anonymous note at the end of every lesson asking kids to list something they learned and something they thought could be better. We monitored their responses throughout. Some of the teaching methods and approaches changed based on their responses.

What have you learned about the ways that news literacy is relevant to the predominantly immigrant families that Erie House serves?

RF: One thing we’ve learned is a lot of our youth were born and raised here. They’re just like any other kid as far as not reading newspapers or what they care about. We did some workshops with parents and that was really pretty powerful because we had people with ages ranging from 25 to 75, so having bilingual interns [was important].

News literacy is relevant to the communities for a lot of reasons. For the people for whom English is their second language, it’s that much more difficult. For kids it’s super important because it provides critical thinking skills. Their parents might be more isolated if they don’t have the ability to absorb news in this country. Parents and kids could continue those conversations at home while watching the news together.

What types of material or approaches most resonate with participants?

RF: Working really hard to make [news literacy] active is the main thing—trying to make fun ways to get those concepts across. For example, we try to have interactive games and activities. Our most recent one is a board game about censorship around the world based on the Reporters without Borders press freedom index. Both teens and adults can play. They move around the board and based on what country they land on, they move back or forwards. Kids have gotten really into it.

Creating an engaging news literacy curriculum

Learn more about Erie House’s You Decide news literacy program. 

Categories: News & Updates, Program Updates