New Efforts to Improve Oregon’s Media Literacy Education Slowly Underway

A look at Senate Bill 552 and the research that supports it

By Kevin Orr, Sage Kiernan-Sherrow, and Logan Hirsch

3/16/21

While using the NASA website as an example during a lesson on trustworthy sources for a research paper, Kate Weber was interrupted by a student with a conspiracy theory.

“Immediately, a kid raised his hand and said ‘that is not a trustworthy website. They lied about the moon landing,’” recalled Weber, President of the Oregon Association of School Libraries. “I was not expecting it, and probably engaged with him for a little too long trying to convince him (otherwise).”

In an age of widespread disinformation, lack of media literacy is becoming a growing issue in Oregon, and stories like Weber’s are not uncommon. A new bill in the Oregon State Assembly, Senate Bill 552, hopes to address this problem.

Weber is one of only 152 licensed school librarians employed in the state of Oregon as of 2020, representing one librarian for every 3,833 K-12 students in the state. This number marks a dramatic 81% decline since 1980, when the state employed 818 licensed school librarians, or one for every 547 students. This statistic is the basis of that bill.

The bill, written by State Senator Chris Gorsek, declares a state of emergency and directs the Department of Education to evaluate school libraries and media program standards, in consultation with the State Library, and report their findings to the legislature by the end of 2021.

“It’s pretty ridiculous that we have disinvested so much in libraries,” Gorsek said. In his view, there are not any schools in Oregon that are doing enough to address media literacy currently.

Why Media Literacy Education?

Media literacy education, as defined by the Center for Media Literacy, “provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet,” and “builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy.”

Weber noted that Oregon’s existing standards do not achieve this.

“Right now, there are pieces in the common core standards that teach students how to do research and how to identify good sources of information, but it doesn’t really encompass the whole media literacy piece,” she said. “And some of the language in (SB552) bumps it up in importance of things to be taught.”

SB552 finally puts Oregon on the map — quite literally, as portrayed by Media Literacy Now’s state-by-state policy map. MLN is a nonprofit and leader in the grassroots movement dedicated to helping advocates, providing tools, training and guidance, and helping policy makers who want to elevate media literacy as a priority, according to MLN founder and President Erin McNeill.

Pivotal to Oregon’s progress with media literacy education are teacher-librarians. According to Tricia Snyder, a teacher-librarian in Reynolds School District and member of the OASL Advocacy Committee alongside Weber, “you need a human whose specialty is information, who’s keeping up on it, and can be seen as that credible voice and partner with all the other people in the school.”

Snyder was instrumental in lobbying Gorsek to introduce SB552, and has spent years fighting an uphill battle with the state over securing more funding for school libraries.

“You have to compete with other things,” Snyder said about education funding. “When you’re up against class size, when you’re up against music programs … people just have to make choices. And then we started to not have people who could advocate for libraries anymore. We became very much a minority.”

Snyder noted that having a library media specialist at every school would ensure consistency in how media literacy is taught as well. “If you have a strong library media specialist at all levels, we as a district can coordinate, we can have scaffolded instructional goals, and ideally they’d be getting foundational instruction in elementary school and start applying it in middle school.”

How Media Literacy Education Works

Psychologists and educational experts alike support the idea of starting media literacy education young.

“A decent literacy program should be developmentally appropriate,” Audrey Lucero, associate professor and Director of Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education at the University of Oregon, said. “Something that would build throughout the other school years like any other subject, a curriculum that builds on the needs of a particular age group.”

McNeill’s research tends to agree. Looking into media literacy as a key solution towards helping parents and students navigate the quickly-developing media landscape led her to contact her then-fifth grade son’s teacher with a proposition: why not craft a three-part lesson plan surrounding media literacy and see how ten-year-olds interact with the curriculum?

The experiment opened McNeill’s eyes, who reported observing a promising level of excitement and engagement among the kids.

“This is something that [kids] want to talk about, that they have a lot to say about because they have a lot of experience with it,” she stated. “It’s important to start early. We say that [media literacy education] should start in kindergarten.” McNeill designed a Scope and Sequence tool to serve as a model for schools to see how curriculum could evolve at different developmental stages of learning.

Experts suggest that starting young is not the only important factor to consider, however -- so is being able to implement media literacy into the topics already being fostered by curriculum.

The Northwest Center of Excellence in Media Literacy is an organization which specializes in creating media literacy curriculum for kids and parents through health-related topics. Founder and Director Marilyn Cohen has seen many examples of these programs working in real-time and notes the foundational power of letting children shape the material.

Cohen recalled one fourth grade class that implemented one of the NCEML’s nutrition-related programs. The class had just won a frisbee tournament and had been profiled by a local reporter. When the day came that the newspaper had been published, the kids were dismayed to find that the reporter had opted to frame the article as a story about growing up in an underprivileged area rather than focusing on the kids’ accomplishment. Instead of getting discouraged, the teacher chose to use aspects of their nutrition program to refocus the lesson on how the reporter’s perspective could be analogized to nutritional labels -- intent on selling an idea to a consumer.

“He said it was one of the best discussions that they’d had all year,” Cohen stated. “There’s a lot to be said for if you can integrate media literacy with the subject matter … there are ways to generalize the lessons learned to many of the things around you.”

“It’s not a separate subject, it’s a way to learn,” McNeill added.

Issues with Implementation

Implementing media literacy education has proved to be no easy feat. Experts say that there are many barriers, including a distinct lack of cooperation from administrators, legislation, and general public knowledge as well as an increasingly complicated digital landscape.

“Things are moving very quickly and a lot of people don’t even understand or are only coming to understand what’s happening in our media system, how algorithms are affecting what we see and therefore how we believe,” Cohen said. “It’s … having such a profound effect … that it’s hard to keep up with it … and the education system and teacher-training system is not set up to respond quickly to these types of applications.”

And while SB552 seeks to address these issues, experts like Cohen and McNeill say that the legislation is not enough on its own.

“You see some disconnect in states where they’ve passed legislation but been unable to reach that next step because you have to have the ground swell at the same time,” said Cohen. “You can’t sidestep training people and all the awareness campaigns, involving parents, writing the articles … legislation is important … it helps to raise awareness, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that meaningful change will come of it.”

Conclusion

As for what’s to come of SB552, Gorsek hopes that the study will confirm the need to improve school library services and serve as a bridge to something bigger.

“I’m hoping that it will give us a little bit of momentum to get back to the state and say, ‘hey, we have to do more and rehire or hire new librarians,’ because it’s inadequate the way it is,” he said.

Gorsek believes the bill has a good chance of passing, but that ensuing legislation that would devote more funding and resources to school libraries likely would not come to fruition until 2023, thanks to the shorter 2022 legislative session. Nevertheless, he remains committed.

“We’ll find a way to move forward one way or another,” he said.

McNeill didn’t sugarcoat the seriousness of what’s at stake, stating that, “a lot of people can see some of the threats and issues … but it’s much bigger than that -- this is a real threat to democracy. That’s the kind of level of concern that people need to have to decide that we need to make a change.”

However, she is hopeful because of Oregon’s new legislation and amplified sense of urgency.

“Programs and standards can change but when it’s written in the law, it really kind of amps it up a little bit and gives advocates something to point to to say ‘you have to do this, it’s the law’,” she said.

Cohen echoed that optimism as well.

“The interest in media literacy education has never been greater, so that’s one of the most encouraging things that is happening.”