Introduction:
I teach in a Chicago public school on the city’s Southwest side that has historically served first-generation Latino students. In 2014, our district decided to change our school from a neighborhood school to a Selective Enrollment, a magnet school. Starting in 2015, students have had to test in. Still, our school continues to serve mostly students from the surrounding Zip codes. While our low-income population has decreased to 82% from 96%, we continue to serve students from mostly working-class backgrounds, most of whom will be the first to attend college (if they decide to).
When I started teaching there in 2011, I resurrected the journalism class with the support of the principal. But students were used to writing superficial stories about school dances and captioning lots of photos. As I pushed students to write authentic, accurate news articles and editorials for the school newspaper, one student asked (before the term became popular), “Why can’t we just print fake news?”
I explained how irresponsible this is.
The student said, “No, we can write ‘This is not true’ at the bottom.”
“Uh, no,” I said.
The school newspaper included no evidence of the six principles of news literacy, as articulated by SchoolJournalism.org. For instance, the newspaper content showed little to no “synthesis of multiple sources into meaningful context and comprehension of its impact.”1
Every semester, I find that 30-50% of the 11th and 12th graders in our journalism class requested it. The rest were enrolled by the school programmer. I do not have overzealous high-school journalists wanting to break new ground with an investigation. Many of them don’t have much of an idea of journalism as a career. Because of this situation, most of the writing is completed in class.
Still, I want our school newspaper--as any school paper should--to represent our students’ voices and cover issues and experiences that matter to them. I want students to see themselves in the school paper--to see themselves in terms of agency, not oppression.
In “Reclaiming Multicultural Education: Course Redesign as a Tool for Transformation,” Mae Chaplin explains how a “transformative” approach to multicultural education must include learning experiences that address “systems of oppression,” a “means for social transformation,” and “multiple counternarratives.”2
I continuously ask myself, “What’s the role of a high-school journalist?”
Now, in 2020, in an era of a pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo, the answer--now, more than ever--is clear: students must create texts grounded in a socially responsible consciousness of race so their ideas contribute to a more equitable world.
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