Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Michael Spikes
Dr. Michael Spikes talks to us about reliability, credibility, and relevance of news media, fundamentals of communication, and staying curious in a wide world of media. Dr. Spikes is known for his work in media literacy education, news media literacy, and youth media. He has more than a decade experience as a practitioner and scholar of news media literacy in previous positions with Stony Brook University, Washington DC Public Schools, and the Newseum. Dr. Michael A. Spikes is a lecturer and a project director in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2023, Dec 12). A conversation with Michael Spikes (Season 4, No. 6) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/AABF-F2D5-71AE-0E7D-6506-N
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Education Research has a problem the work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help. In each episode, I talk with a top education researcher or expert educator about what they have learned from their research and experiences. In this episode, Dr Michael Spikes talks to us about reliability, credibility and relevance of news media, fundamentals of communication and staying curious in a wide world of media. Dr Spikes is known for his work in media literacy, education, news media literacy and youth media. He has more than a decade experience as a practitioner and scholar of news media literacy in previous positions with Stony Brook University, Washington DC public schools and the museum. Dr Michael A Spikes is a lecturer and project director in the Medeal School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me, your host, Lindsay Persan, for Classroom Caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Michael, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Michael Spikes:Thank you so much for having me.
Lindsay Persohn:So, from your own experiences and education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Michael Spikes:So one of them that probably sticks out to me the most when thinking about this question is something that happened to me right when I started with the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, and that was 2012 that I got offered the job. They're actually. What wound up happening was I went to Stony Brook for a teacher training institute back in 2010 to learn about news literacy, and this was the first time I had learned about the particular approach to teaching news literacy and what it was. And about two years later I had done a lot of, I guess, lobbying to the folks in charge. They were really saying like I love this stuff and if you ever have anything that comes up, please let me know. And I got invited to come back and speak at a conference like a year after that, in 2011, and in 20 at the end of 2011,. Then they presented me with some paperwork about a grant they had just gotten and asked me what that I think I could do, and then joined them in 2012. So after I got offered this job, the first thing I got asked to do was to get a passport, because I didn't have one, and travel halfway around the globe to, I should say all the way around the globe, because I think this is on the opposite side of the globe to me, to the small country of Bhutan and Bhutan if listeners don't know, geographically it is north of India and south of Tibet. And the reason why we were going there, I was going there with the then director of the center. We were going there to do some training with a NGO there named the Bhutan Center for Media and Democracy, because Bhutan was in the process. The country is in the process of transitioning from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy where there would still be a king that would be in charge of the country, but the people would begin to have representatives like representatives and people like that. They would start to vote and all those kind of things, and this was something that was the choice of the monarch at the time. So, in association with this media in the ways that we think about it, and that being television was relatively new in the country. They had had cable television, I think for maybe about 10 years at that time and the internet was totally brand new there. So we were asked to come over to do a bit of media training for educators in the country. So I get everything together. I go over there and on the first day I think it was the first day I was there we had done traveling in.
Michael Spikes:This was like March of 2012, and a lot of attention had started to be paid to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and while I was there, I jumped on my computer and I was a pretty avid user of Facebook at the time and I remember jumping on Facebook and seeing lots of reactions from friends about the shooting itself, the shooter and really people going off of very incomplete pieces of information about it and really letting that direct their responses to it. Now, everyone comes to this from their own point of view. They use that as a lens to understand this. But I remember coming across a story, or an analysis piece, I think, that came out of the New York Times that talked specifically about how media were portraying both the shooter and the victim, trayvon, and the story basically talked about the fact that the shooter and now granted, this is not. I should give the caveat that this I hope this will not allude to my own thoughts on the shooting or associated issues like these, but, being a person who was very much interested in media literacy, having an analysis piece that talked about the portrayals of both of these people, and that being that any images of the shooter that we were seeing were mostly the shooter's mugshot and the pictures that we were seeing of the victim, trayvon, were of a middle school graduation photo. And really there was conversations in this piece that were about how were these portrayals shaping the public's view of what happened. Now, granted, again, I want to go back and say that the shooting of a young person is never justified, like I think violence like that is important. I am not a person that believes in that, but I think it was important for people to think about how did media portrayals of both of these people not only just say here is what happened, but also helped to shape people's opinions of what happened?
Michael Spikes:And so I took this story, shared it on my Facebook page. Then, like I go away and a couple of hours later I come back and the amount of vitriol that was given to me in terms of comments to the fact that I had even posted this story were amazing to me. Like people were calling me things and I have to say, as an African-American myself, like people calling me Uncle Tom, like who side are you on, you know all these kind of things Just by inviting a conversation about how were these two people involved in this story being portrayed and how can we think more critically about our own reactions to what happened? Based on that and it struck me so much, being one, like I say, being African-American myself, being involved in a project that was all about learning how to become more mindful consumers of media and how it affects us, and at the same time, being in a country I had never been in before that had largely a monoculture of people there, and coming there to teach them these skills, and one, you know, experiencing it for myself, like I was one of the only you know black people over there, and at one point I've walked around in a village and had a bunch of children following me because they thought I was some famous basketball player, right. So you know again that to me it also speaks to how media shapes our portrayals of who we see, who we think we see, and all those kind of things.
Michael Spikes:So that experience in particular, I think, really shaped a lot of my own views on how I approach teaching people about media literacy and from that, one of the things I took away from that was. It's very, very important, and at least the thing that I like to try to focus on are the skills teaching people skill sets and giving them knowledge about how you know and, particularly for me, how news is produced, because news media literacy or news literacy is what my area of focus is in, and that is taking skills so that people can make their own decisions about you know what's reliable. I'm very careful to not just say what's true and not, because truth is a so much bigger concept, much more abstract than I think. Something like credibility how do we know that something is credible or not? And knowing if it's useful to us or not irrelevant. And in those cases, you know, I also reflect on something that happens a lot of times when I give training workshops and people ask me well, where do you get your news from? And really what I think they're asking me is, where should I get my news from? And then I tell folks like that's not my goal. My goal here is not to tell you read this or only watch this, or only go here or only listen to this or blah, blah, blah. I am here to equip you with skills so you can make that determination for yourself, based in concepts like, again, credibility, reliability, verification, evidence, like all those kind of things, so that you can become the critical thinker and exercise a healthy dose of skepticism. Where you're trying to figure out is the information that's in front of me is it helpful for my needs right now and also, can I reflect on what needs I have when that brings me toward these pieces of information and media, so that I can become a much more mindful and this is a term I like to use a lot more mindful consumer and also, as we know now, producer of media. So that's one. That was probably a really long description of the one.
Michael Spikes:The second one probably relates a lot to what I was just talking about, and that was I gave a talk at a local library a few years ago and this was not too long after the 2016 election and I remembered that the coordinators of this talk had titled the talk fake news and alternative facts. That was not my choice, but it brought in like there was over 90 people came to this talk, so I gave my lecture. That comes from the model of news literacy and that comes from Stony Burke University's model on media bias, and how we talk about media bias is we frame it around the concepts of journalistic balance and fairness, and what we like to say is that it's important to understand that balance is a quantitative measurement between all the different sides of a given situation and it's meant to be its balance. It's like if you have, say, for instance, a bill being argued in Congress, you would give the same amount of space or time to a Democratic senator as you would to a Republican, and then fairness is really is much more complicated, is much more about are we fair to the evidence that's in front of us? And we try to frame this by saying it's important to have balance when we have a situation that we that's still being debated, like we don't know everything just yet, so it's important for us to get information in a balanced sort of way. But when there is a proliferation of evidence on, say, one side rather than the other, if one does present that as about with balance, then we can have an unfair, we give an unfair advantage to one side over the other. We create a false equivalency between both sides. So this is where fairness becomes very, very important, so that we be fair to the amount of evidence. If there's a proliferation of evidence on one side, we have to present the story in that kind of way. So, anyway, we use that to frame media bias.
Michael Spikes:To say outlet is bias If there's an unfair representation of a particular subject. Again and again and again, that's what we will call bias. Also, in terms of personal bias, I also sort of use the definition and I think a lot of people misuse this term. We talk about personal bias, but not just talking about that. A person has a particular viewpoint on something. People can have their own views. It is a willing distortion of incoming information to fit in that particular point of view. So if we hear lots of things about the 2020 election being stolen and it being these hoax and so on, if there's a proliferation of evidence that shows us that's not the case, then I would say that the person that puts that out there is biased, because they will willingly distort that evidence and information to fit that point of view. So, anyway, so I give all that background to say I give this lecture in a hour form, so I just gave it to you in a couple of minutes.
Michael Spikes:I give this lecture at this local library and I have a gentleman coming to me afterwards and he says to me I really liked your stuff, but I didn't like your examples. And granted, I do use examples to highlight the concepts I'm talking about. They come from mainstream media sources, say, like a CNN or even a Fox News, or even like the New York Times. So they'll come from these places. So I asked the gentleman I say so, tell me, you know, give me some hints, tell me where else I might want to draw some of my examples from. He gave me the names of a couple of outlets that I might call a little questionable.
Michael Spikes:But the thing I take away from that experience was I got this gentleman to at least engage again in the skills, the knowledge, those pieces. It wasn't that, although I didn't agree with the places he got information from, this was not a situation where I was just trying to bash all of those sources. The hope is that by giving these particular skills that I could allow this gentleman maybe not in the immediate time, because that I would never expect that to happen, but in that time it at least would give him the skills and he could be receptive to that to say how do I know that this is useful, that is credible, that it's a reliable source for me to get my information from. So I would say those two situations were really sort of drive. I think a lot of the work in the approaches that I take now what you're sharing with us, michael, I think, well, it's obviously critical.
Lindsay Persohn:It's always been critical, but I feel like it's become much more critical in the last at least decade and it actually it makes me think of conversations I've had, sometimes even with my own family, when I say, well, what are you watching? And they say the news. And I'm like you know, that's not news, right, that's news commentary, which is not the same thing. But I think the way that you highlight some of these definitions and you highlight these concepts can really help us to understand what it is that we're consuming and how we actually do make our own sense of it, not someone else's sense of it.
Lindsay Persohn:Because I feel like, particularly as a resident of Florida and having lived here for about 40 years now, it has been very interesting to hear even tidbits of conversations out in public and things like that and just sort of people's beliefs and what they're founded on, that they aren't necessarily their own beliefs, they are the views of someone else that are you can, you can even tell that they're being parroted right and that I have found to be a very intriguing and alarming kind of public conversation lately, because you know, we really shouldn't be taking what everybody else thinks of what's going on in the world and just taking their views, you know, kind of without any sort of, as you said, healthy skepticism.
Lindsay Persohn:I think that's just such an important point for us to understand what that means, because I understand that you're also not saying that doesn't mean we don't believe in anything, right, that doesn't. That doesn't mean we become apathetic to the news, because I think sometimes that's the other alternative. But how do we approach this? With our eyes wide open, so to speak, in order to see not just one side of a story but potentially multiple sides, and to take into account things we may not yet have considered ourselves.
Michael Spikes:Yeah, yeah, those, yeah, those concepts I think are really really important and key to, I think, any approach to media literacy or the plethora of other literacies that are out there. You know, you've heard me mention news literacy or news media literacy. There's digital literacy, there's, I've heard, algorithmic literacy. There's all kinds of stuff out there, right, and it's really about building a almost like a disposition that is based in that healthy skepticism. And just what you said is what I mentioned to lots of people when I give talks and I say we want to build that in our students, no matter who they are, if those are adults or if they are children. We want to build a healthy skepticism, but we also do acknowledge there's a fine line between healthy skepticism and cynicism, and cynicism being when somebody just says, well, I can't believe anything because it's all sort of based in, you know, like when you talk about news in particular, people say, well, you know they're all controlled by these cabals and you know they're all out for profit and da, da, da, da, da. I can acknowledge, yeah, that's the case. News outlets, you know, especially mainstream news outlets. They are profit making businesses, right, but one of the things that I also tried to build in and this, again, this goes back to that idea about building that disposition it is understanding what are the intentions of the producers. One can say that a news outlet in particular, yes, they're trying to make a profit because they have to pay people. It does take money to capture and interpret and write and distribute content. And although the internet has sort of led us into believing that all content is just free, right, it still takes people to create that content and people for all. I mean, I don't know about you, but I know I got to get a check at the end of the day because I got bills to pay. So with that, I do hope that there could be some financial incentives that come along with that.
Michael Spikes:But at the same time, like we have, then we have to really say, like, what are the intents of the content? What are the methods that drive, that are driven by those intents? So I would say, for, like journalists, the goal should be to inform, right. So with that being the primary intent, then that drives the methods. They go out, they talk to multiple people, they structure stories in a way that they're easily accessible for their audiences, and so on. But also, as you just mentioned, we have a very complex and somewhat blurred lines that pop up in the sort of internet ecosystem where we have lots of people who may create things that they self-identify as news, but really what it sort of turns into and the methods that they use are really more opinion styles.
Michael Spikes:So we hear, like, thoughts, analysis, you know, and so on, of you know recent things that are going on, and we sort of interpret it as news because it concerns current events. Yes, and it also can meet a need for us, right? I think it's important to acknowledge that when I think, when something happens and this is also something we talk about in the model of news that are seeded I draw from and we say, like it's almost like human nature for us to want to receive and share information, Right, you hear a rumor or you hear something that you think nobody else knows, and what's the first thing you want to do? You want to tell someone. Right, so we always have that innate need.
Michael Spikes:So when we go back to this idea of news and opinion and how those things kind of get merged together in our current ecosystem, when something big happens, we want to talk about it with people and in a lot of cases, those sort of like heavily talk, heavily opinionated shows almost Provides us that space to be a part of a conversation about that particular issue. So it almost meets a need that we have to talk about it, like think about this podcast. We're talking about education, we have conversations. We want it to be very conversational. It's not just Me from Ohio or whoever your guest is, just from all high saying I say X and you should believe all that. Right, it's really, it's a conversation.
Michael Spikes:So, and it's something that I think as humans, it makes us much different than many other mammals out there. We we can reason, we can debate, we can do all these kind of things and that's what we want to do. So I think it's important to just keep those things in mind, where, again, we have to keep in mind what are the intents, and not only the intents of the creators of the media, To know what methods drive it, to know what we're looking at, but also what are our own Intentions for coming towards that piece. So, just like I talked about these very heavily conversational shows about current events, it may be meeting a need that we have to work out like what is this very complicated thing that's happening. So just to be aware of those things.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, and as you were describing that, michael, I was also thinking about a Potentially a whole new genre news, which is spoof news.
Lindsay Persohn:I'm sure you've seen these say guy know, folks have sent links to me where you've got someone who is posing as a journalist, posing to share facts, out in the public and Most often people just agree with him and act as though they know exactly what he's talking about, you know which, which certainly does not carry with it that that healthy skepticism, that critical stance, right Would people? Yeah that, yes, that that's it, that's it when you, when you know it's completely fabricated. So lots of things to navigate these days, that's for sure.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah so what do you want listeners to know about your work? I?
Michael Spikes:think the primary, primary thing I would hope for people to take away is that, especially when we talk about, I think, media literacy in general and all of the various I like to refer to them as subdomains of media literacy or the sister domains, almost like the information literacy and things like that I hope that what people can really think about is these are skills that are meant to develop dispositions, and that disposition is not something that you develop overnight, so it is not something that you get from. You played the game and now, all of a sudden, you super smart and doing this. You went to my talk and, yeah, you might have learned a lot, but there's still a lot more to learn. Right, you may have taken a class and you learned a lot from that, but that's not the place where that kind of learning ends, and I think the other thing, too, is that we also have to understand like we learn continually throughout life, no matter if we're in school or not.
Michael Spikes:Right, so it is to really sort of unlock. I would hope at least my approach to this would be to unlock and innate curiosity that Sometimes one may argue schooling can almost Beat out of us right towards just finding very discreet and specific answers to questions and Not sort of saying like I know X, I might know X, this one little fact, but there's still a whole lot of other stuff that I still don't know. So I think, if anything, I hope that people can take away that sense of that innate curiosity is something that we have to continually draw on, pull on and work from, because if not, if we don't use that, then the skills that I know, that I try to teach, and the skills that we're talking about, they become super effortful, because it does take effort. It takes effort for us to step back and say wait a minute, where'd that come from? Or how did you know that, or what's the evidence to support that? Or even, especially more so, when one is either talking to people they know really, really well, people that they trust and people who think look at All those things like them, right, so it can be very easy for us to slip into, I think, the very sort of like yep, I agree with that, because we all want to have information that tells us we smart and where you know we're perfect, right, you smart, you look great, you do all this stuff so great and you got all these people that agree with you.
Michael Spikes:Like who doesn't want that right?
Michael Spikes:Like nobody wants to be in a conversation where people just continually go, ah, no, no, no, you know now, granted, that could be fun if you're debating with people, yeah, but but at the same time, like we, we sit around with our friends, everybody agrees With one another and it could be difficult to be the person that stands on the side and says, I Right, it could be difficult to be that person and, again, it does take effort to do that.
Michael Spikes:So it's also important for us to again that innate sense of curiosity. So what we do, hopefully, is we can engage that sort of again that skepticism, that part of us that says, hmm, wait, or? Or ask those questions when did that come from? That we asked those questions toward learning, toward development, toward Greater understanding, so that we can become people that are, that can say to ourselves like I may not know everything, because nobody does, but I can be comfortable in saying I know X, yeah, I think I'm pretty confident about that, but I don't know why. Well, why is it XYZ? So I don't know that and I?
Michael Spikes:and one last thing I'll say to this too, is that you know and I use this a lot, so people know me might be like, yeah, he said that like 5,000 times, but you know, I say like in pursuing a PhD and even having people call me like doctor, which I'm still like, yeah, I guess I did that, but you know.
Michael Spikes:But one of the things people take from that is that you must be so smart, you know all this stuff, you know and so on. And what I like to tell people is yes, I know a lot about this very specific thing, right, that may be only like six or seven other people really really know, really, really well, but by doing that sort of the training that I've gone through to get this degree, it's made me so much more comfortable with saying I know this really really well, but it is a ton of stuff I don't know right, and it's made me and it's again, it's unlocked at curiosity where I go, all those things I don't know, I go, oh, I need to find out more, right, I need to find out more, because by finding out more about those things I don't know, it helps me know even more in the space of the stuff that I do know right. So hopefully we can continue to build that within people.
Lindsay Persohn:I couldn't agree more, michael, that once you get that title of doctor, people just sort of assume that you're an expert at lots of things.
Lindsay Persohn:But really, I think the journey of the PhD is as much as it is developing a very specific knowledge base. It's also realizing how much you don't know and how much there is left to know in the world, right, always pursuing those kinds of curiosities. And so that actually leads me to something else I was thinking about as you're talking. We talked about skills, we've talked about knowledge for media literacy, but what strikes me is that you're also talking about dispositions, right, it's not just a set of skills, it's not just a knowledge that we might carry with us, but it is this sort of it's, this posturing toward news and media that helps us to remain critical yet open, right, and I think that there's a really fine balance there between being open to other points of view and other perspectives or other verifiable truths or other ways of looking at situations. That even goes beyond the skills and the knowledge, and still like remaining open but also remaining skeptical. I feel like that's just a. There's a balance there.
Michael Spikes:Right, right, right, right. Yeah, I think in this, again, I think this comes back like what I talked about earlier, like these ideas about bias, perspective, points of view. Right, to acknowledge that we all have our own points of view, we all are going to have opinions on things, right? And again, I think that makes us learned people, like by having specific points of view. If a person just wants to say, well, I don't have a point of view on anything, then I think that just leaves an apathy, right, like what you referred to earlier. Just, I don't care about anything, and it's just like, well, why would I want to talk to you? And that's not very interesting, right, right? So, keeping those things in mind, I think we have to acknowledge that we all have our own points of view.
Michael Spikes:Like an analogy I use a lot of times when I teach is that when we come towards new information, we bring all our baggage with us. We bring our previous experiences, our identities, what we learn, where we come from, who we are all those things with us, right? So we bring all that with us, we come towards this information and that provides us the lens with which we see the world, right? So, and it is through that lens that shapes our perspectives. But also what we would hope is that, you know, learning like media literacy skills and the associated critical thinking skills allows us to open that lens up and say, oh, there might be something else over here that I don't know or something I didn't understand, or be receptive to hearing the experiences of those people who are very different than us and bring a very different lens to the same situation.
Michael Spikes:We know of many times where I'm sure, like people have probably gotten into arguments with people where something happens and then they say, well, I saw it like this. And then the other person goes well, I saw it like this, all right. And then that conflict happens where you have these very set in your ways beliefs and you just go, well, I'm only going to see it like this. And the other person says, well, you know what, I'm just going to do the same thing. I'll just dig in even further and just say I just believe X and that's. Those tensions can't get resolved until we take a step back and can say your lens is X, my lens is this. Can we acknowledge those two lenses and then say, ok, what do we do now so at least we can understand where we're coming from.
Lindsay Persohn:I think that's so important, and something I've been thinking about a lot lately and I think I even mentioned it in the last episode is that I feel like the older I get and the more people I meet, the more willing I am to consider that maybe the things I think and the things that I do aren't necessarily the best, so to speak.
Lindsay Persohn:Quote unquote right, that maybe there are better ways of seeing things or better ways of doing things that maybe I didn't ever consider. Right, because I think whenever we think about like our own lens and our own perspective, sometimes that comes with some really strong blinders. Right, like we don't even realize that someone else stands in the world in a different place than we do. Right, and so fundamentally, the way they see is going to be different than the way that we see because they haven't had the same experiences, because they don't have the same background, because they don't have the same knowledge, they don't have the same skills, they don't have the same interests. And I just I think that, that I think more and more about that, that perhaps these norms that we become so accustomed to maybe it's really not the best way, maybe it's just the way that we can't see around.
Michael Spikes:Right, right, right, but also, at the same time and I think this is something we probably we see a lot that we struggle with in our current era, and that is, I think, more and more, those perspectives and lenses are being we're being exposed to so many more now, right, and they challenge the norms that have helped shape our society, because norms are used to help shape societies and groups of people. Right, like it was interesting enough, I just came back to begin in this week from being involved with a teacher training Institute at the National World War Two Museum down in New Orleans, and we talked a lot about the role of propaganda, not only in terms of, like the Nazi propaganda because usually when we talk about propaganda, that's what we first think about that were used to mobilize a society towards, you know, the ends that Adolf Hitler had in Germany and why they felt they needed to do the things that they did, but we also wanted to think about propaganda in terms of mobilizing a society toward another group of ends, right, those ends being, you know they have this sort of. They have a, an exhibit that's called the arsenal of democracy, which was a phrase that we, you was used by Franklin Roosevelt as part of that effort to really say to Americans we have to get involved in this conflict because if we don't, the consequences of that could be dire. Right, and communicating that to a group of people who really did not feel like the US needed to get involved in this conflict up until you know Pearl Harbor made it very evident for us, I think, is like super interesting, right. So in that particular case you do have you know people and using things like media to persuade a group of people to believe certain things that say like this is the society we want to live in, right, and there are certain norms that we have as part of our society that can be that sort of tell us, like you stop at a stoplight when the light is rare, right, you stop at the stop sign. It kind of says for us, it says like here are the rules we follow. But then there have also been norms that have said like certain people are better than others. You know, again, the extreme being the Nazi, you know the Nazi example.
Michael Spikes:But like now we talk about media, one of the things I talk with lots of people about is the fact that we do not have very many shared cultural experiences anymore. Right, like if you think about the sheer amount of selection we have of television shows and music and everything that's out there, right, everybody is all. It's almost like our whole society has been segmented into these little micro audiences and they all are really into the things that they're into and that's great, I mean. I think you know, on the good side, that has allowed us to be exposed to messages and people's and perspectives that we never would have seen before, because there's certain groups of people, whether they be minorities in terms of ethnic group or religious, you know, group, sector or whatever did not have access to the capital, did not have access to the equipment, did not have access to the means to broadcast messages that they felt were very important to their groups. So now the internet has very much democratized media and it's made it where lots of more people can get their messages out, and we can hear that from very many. But again, what that has done is this it's caused conflicts in the ways that, like now, we see the world right and we see many examples of that out in the world.
Michael Spikes:Now I would even say for myself, like as I get older this is my analogy I just go like I just don't watch anything anymore. Like I you know people tell me about did you watch that? I go no, did you see on neff? No, did you know? Because it's just so much out there. What I usually just want to do is just reading about it Because, yeah, I'm just like other people.
Michael Spikes:I have things that I see and I'm like, yeah, I don't really get that, or I don't even know if I really want to spend the time with it, and I may go back to the sort of nostalgic, you know, view of like oh, I think I'll watch some old episodes of like the prices right or something today, like that'd be the choice right, cause it's just like, well, yeah, that'd be okay.
Michael Spikes:I think that, cause I know that, I know that I recognize it is something that relates to me and like resonates and all those kinds of things. So, anyway, sorry, I just went off on somewhat of a tangent, but I think again, like those challenges to those norms is something that we I think you know we're really struggling with today, and part of that is because we have opened up the doors to so many more messages. Now, that's not to say that this is a crisis I wouldn't say that, but I would say that it what it has done is. It's made evident that we all now have to become much more mindful of what we're getting, where we're getting it from and, again, why we are going to those places. To get that information, entertainment, wherever from these places, why do we go to those places to do so?
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, and I can totally relate to that perspective. I actually have found myself watching old episodes of pressure luck not too long ago, because, you're right, there's so much, where do you start? And I tend to not start a new series because I know I won't find the time to finish it. Hey, have you seen the seven series of such and such? I'm like, no, haven't even seen the first one. So I can totally sympathize with that viewpoint that sometimes now I'll just I'll be reading over here right.
Lindsay Persohn:Or I'll be working on another project over here. I totally, totally understand that. So there's something you mentioned earlier, michael, that I just want to kind of pick back up on, because you mentioned a model that you typically work from, a model of news media literacy, and I'm wondering if you might share a bit about that with us, particularly if it's something that educators might find portable, something that they can actualize in their classrooms, right, so something that they can work with in order to support young people in particular, to navigate the wide, wide digital world.
Michael Spikes:Yeah, so I will give the caveat that, as a human, I have my own point of view on these things right. So the model that I draw from is one that I am very familiar with, is one I've worked with a lot, and I can say that from my scholarship that I've had the opportunity to evaluate a number of other models, specifically of news literacy, and I do have to say I keep coming back to the one that I have been so familiar with and that comes from the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University. Now, for many people who might be familiar with news literacy, they probably are more familiar with another model of this education and that comes from the News Literacy Project. I think they do great work. They have a online platform that's called Checkology that is open and free for people to access, and their approach is much more about the development and learning through modules instead of like sheer, just lessons. So you can go to their website, you can learn a particular concept on their website, watch a video. I know they have like an app. I think they have some games out there that people can play and they have a community of teachers who are talking about these things out there. So they've built a very robust system.
Michael Spikes:The reason why I come back to the Center for News Literacy's approach is that it is a full course. It does have, I think, 14 lessons as part of it, and I do find that its sequence of lessons fit well into one another that come toward a capstone skill, which is active deconstruction of media. Now it uses and this is one of the things that I think distinguishes news media literacy from, say, media literacy, and that is that it teaches the same skills as media literacy, those mindful consumption and production practices, but it does so through the lens of journalism. So it draws from the practices of journalists that journalists use to do their jobs. It draws from those practices to help others pick those up and use them in their everyday life, and it also uses news as a platform for practicing those skills. So if we teach students, like journalists, verify claims made in news stories by providing evidence to support those claims, we then would tell our students you turn around and when you watch the news you look for that evidence. You look for evidence of verification, you look for that. So, with that being said, that model is available from the Center for News Literacy.
Michael Spikes:I will obviously, I will say that I played a big role in putting parts of that together. I did not develop this model that was developed by Howard Schneider and the group of individuals that helped to establish the Center for News Literacy but I played a key role in making those resources available online through the Center's Digital Resource Center, and those make available lots of the resources that were used to teach the course. The whole course is up there. I even have taken off a piece of it and made another version of that course an online course. It's called Get News Smart. That's available from the Center itself, and then I have another version that's called Get, basically Get News Smart 2. That has the same content, because I continue to use that model in my own teaching.
Michael Spikes:The other one that I will mention again this is you know what I'm here I'm going to tout even my own stuff is that you may be familiar with the fact that in 2021, yes, I think that's the year Illinois became the first state that required putting to place a requirement for media literacy education for all high school students, and now, granted, that's defined as a unit and that unit is super broad.
Michael Spikes:But in response to that, a colleague of mine by the name of Yanti Friesen, and I got together and really started to think a lot about what will implementation of this new law look like.
Michael Spikes:So what we did was we got together and we founded an organization called the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition and through that, what we wanted to do is bring together a group of these are interested parties, and these include teachers, librarians, educators of all stripes to come together to talk about what this should look like in our state. We wrote a framework for media literacy that includes four basic concepts, because we know that there's lots of resources out there that teachers could draw from. So we wanted to give a sort of broad approach to media literacy. Again, I see that as the upper level of news literacy, but media literacy, and through that framework we hope that teachers can see these concepts and then think, oh, I'm already doing some of this already and this is how it can be implemented in my existing content. So we don't bring them new stuff, we just sort of give them new vocabulary around the things they already do. So that again is from our organization, the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition.
Lindsay Persohn:Great and we can link to any of those resources on your guest page for listeners who may want to learn more about any of these initiatives and how they can support them, and I would guess both developing teachers' own media literacies as well as supporting their students to develop their media literacies.
Michael Spikes:Yeah, yeah, this is a big bit of interest of mine has been not so much on just students' work but, yes, more so on teachers, great.
Lindsay Persohn:Great, yeah, that would be fantastic. We'll include links to those sites on your guest page for listeners. So, michael, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Michael Spikes:I think number one. The message I want to give to teachers is this is a continuing practice that we mentioned, so I want to encourage them to continue to engage with the topics around media literacy and also, I should say, probably even more important, is to not get too bogged down by all of the technological changes. Teachers should not feel like I need to know TikTok and every other social media platform that pops up in order to engage in these skills with their students, because I will tell you, I know TikTok. I don't use it regularly because I, for me, as a viewer, it just it doesn't speak to me. I can't I really I can't stand watching videos like badly shot video, all that kind of stuff. Like I am a media professional, I do not want to watch your badly shot videos, right, that doesn't appeal to me. But with that, to understand that really, when we talk about social media, what we're talking about is, when it really comes down to, is communication. It is how we communicate with one another. Basically, all of these apps and things like that, these are platforms that basically facilitate communication amongst individuals. So, keeping that in mind, if we think about the fundamentals of how we communicate, I have a message I send it to someone, somebody receives it, they interpret it, they may give me some feedback to tell me whether or not they got it or not, and then I'll respond back. Right, like. Those are the basics, like I always start almost every class I teach with that basic.
Michael Spikes:They call it the transactional model of communications. It is a sender has a message they want to send. They send it through, I should say, a channel, whether that be text, like right now I'm talking to you, so through voice. They may do it through video, which, would you know, combine both visuals and the audio, and so on, or like in terms of this podcast, we just we have audio and they are inherent advantages and limitations to all of those different mediums, right that we send messages through. Think about the fact that media is the plural of medium, right? So keeping that into account, so those shape, those can shape how we put those messages together. And then again, the receiver receives that message and if we hope that they interpret it in the same way that we have for sending it, right? So if we keep that in mind, I think that very, very basic thing it can help us to really engage with these topics, no matter what the platform, no matter what the technology, no matter. You know again, the shared experiences through media, probably things that we just do not have as much these days, but we still communicate with one another continuously. So I think it's important to keep those things in mind when we think about engaging these topics with our students.
Michael Spikes:Secondly I'll just throw out there and we talked about this a lot earlier is, I think, in any classroom, in any educator, the thing that we really want to do is unlock and continue to encourage students to engage with this innate curiosity about the world and to take the methods that we use in the classroom questioning, you know, assessing, evaluating, all those kind of things and take them far outside of the classroom. So I would encourage any of the educators that are out there to continue doing that. I would venture to guess that, if you are listening to a podcast about teaching, that you are always interested in improving your practice, right, and the way you do so is by staying curious yourself, right, you stay curious about what could I continue to do? So we want to keep encouraging more and more teachers to do that in their classrooms, encourage their students to do that, and I think the skills, that I give certain vocabulary around, you'll find that these are things that you already do. So those are the two big things that I would give to teachers.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, it's such a helpful message, I feel like, because you know it is easy to get lost in all the newest and the latest and the greatest. But whenever we boil it back to the fundamentals of communication because that remains the same even when the platforms change right and staying curious, I think those are such critical messages in today's day and age when I think, as an educator, it is easy to lose yourself in the noise right. It's easy to sort of lose your mission, to lose your own purpose or your own vision. It's even easy to lose your curiosity whenever you feel like you're sort of being beat over the head from every direction. You know. But I think, whatever you boil it back to fundamentals and curiosity, it's just really it's a very helpful way to think about it. So I really appreciate that, michael.
Michael Spikes:I'm glad. I hope that lots of people take that forward into the next school year.
Lindsay Persohn:Great. Well, michael, I thank you so much for your time today and I thank you for your contributions to the world of education.
Michael Spikes:Thank you so much for having me as part of this ongoing conversation. I hope there was lots for your listeners to take away, and if they have any questions for me, please feel free to reach out.
Lindsay Persohn:Perfect. Thank you so much. We'll include your contact information on your guest page as well. Great Thank you.
Lindsay Persohn:Dr Michael Spikes is known for his work in media literacy education, news media literacy and youth media. Dr Spikes research is centered on the practice and pedagogy of media literacy education and news media literacy, working toward encouraging critical thinking to limit the effects of exposure to myths and disinformation. His focus is on the design, assessment and enactments of these literacies in classrooms and other learning environments. He has recently been involved in implementation of strategies for incorporating units of media literacy education into existing K through 12 curricula for educators in Illinois. Michael is also the co-founder of the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition and the Illinois State Chapter Leader for Media Literacy. Now His work is recognized by the Illinois State Board of Education as key resources for media literacy education and by the Illinois News Broadcasters Association as a 2022 recipient of the Illinois of the Year Award. He has previously held roles as a media producer and editor for NPR, the PBS, news Hour and the Kellogg School of Management, project manager for the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University and a media studies teacher in both public and charter schools in Washington DC. His work has appeared in information and learning sciences Journal of Educational Technology Systems and in several book chapters. Michael earned his PhD in the learning sciences from Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy in August of 2023. Dr Michael A Spikes is a lecturer and project director in the Medill School of Journalism, media, integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University.
Lindsay Persohn:For the good of all students, classroom Caffeine aims to energize education, research and practice. If this show gives you things to think about, help us spread the word. Talk to your colleagues and educator friends about what you hear. You can support the show by subscribing, liking and reviewing this podcast through your podcast provider. Visit classroomcaffeinecom, where you can subscribe to receive our short monthly newsletter, the Espresso Shot. On our website, you can also learn more about each guest, find transcripts for our episodes, more topics using our drop-down menu of tags, request an episode, topic or potential guest, support our research through our listener survey or learn more about the research we're doing on our publications page. Connect with us on social media through Instagram, facebook and Twitter. We would love to hear from you. Special thanks to the Classroom Caffeine team Leah Berger, abaya Veluru, stephanie Branson and Shaba Hojfath. As always, I raise my mug to you, teachers. Thanks for joining me.