PROJECT CENSORED IN THE CLASSROOM
Critical thinking and media literacy are essential skill sets for students in the 21st century. Teachers who bring Project Censored into their classrooms give their students direct, hands-on opportunities to develop their critical thinking skills and media literacy.
Our Academic Education programs are used in traditional classrooms, and homeschooling or other educational settings, to help students of all ages develop media literacy skills and enjoy hands-on experience to enhance that education.
Our programs informing the public generally leverage the work of these students to provide education to members of the general public who want to engage with our work, whether as a means to develop their own media literacy skills or as a source for trustworthy independent journalism on topics that are not adequately covered by establishment (“mainstream”) news outlets.
TEACHING GUIDES
Project Censored provides educators around the country with resources for teaching media literacy, including workshop opportunities and free, downloadable teaching guides. Teachers who bring Project Censored into their classrooms give their students direct, hands-on opportunities to develop their critical thinking skills and media literacy. Select the appropriate teaching guide below for your classroom.
THE GLOBAL CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATORS GUIDES
The GCMLP implements the outcomes of a critical media literacy education through a service learning pedagogy. Students will be introduced to exercises, experiences, and assignments, which focus on developing student’s classroom engagement, empowerment, critical awareness of media, civic engagement, and adoption of a social justice agenda. All we ask in exchange is that you share these guides with your colleagues at your institution and beyond. Project Censored campus workshops are also available and can be arranged by contacting info@projectcensored.org
Critical Media Literacy For Students
Critical thinking and media literacy are essential skill sets for students in the 21st century. Teachers who bring Project Censored into their classrooms give their students direct, hands-on opportunities to develop their critical thinking skills and media literacy.
For college students, researching Validated Independent News stories (VINs) can be a challenging and rewarding assignment that instructors can tailor to fit their courses and students’ needs. Identifying, researching, and summarizing candidate stories will sharpen students’ critical thinking skills (including interpretation, evaluation, and explanation) and enhance their media literacy.
Project Censored posts candidate stories accepted as Validated Independent News (VINs) online and subsequently considers these for inclusion among the top 25 stories in our annual book. Both online and in the book, we acknowledge the students and faculty who contribute VINs by name.
For guidelines on how to find, evaluate, and summarize Validated Independent News stories, click here.
For both high school and college students, instructors can consider our “Censorship Guide for Teachers: 12 Ways To Use Project Censored In Your Classroom.” We also recommend the Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME) resource, “Our 21st Century Media Culture: Eight Shifts.”
How it works
We are dedicated to student education as a means of promoting democracy, freedom of expression, and greater equality in society. The cornerstone of the program—developing students’ critical media literacy through hands-on engagement—involves empowering students to critically assess existing media structures and practices so that they can contribute to the development of an alternative system that better reflects their diversity and serves our common good.
The Campus Affiliates program is currently focused on college-level education and is broken down into two areas: (1) Media Literacy Education and Curriculum Guides and (2) our Campus Affiliates Program. This program connects hundreds of faculty and students at colleges and universities across the U.S. and around the world in a collective effort to identify and promote public awareness of important but underreported news topics.
This project provides educators around the country with resources for teaching media literacy, including workshop opportunities and free, downloadable teaching guides. Teachers who bring Project Censored into their classrooms give their students direct, hands-on opportunities to develop their critical thinking skills and media literacy.
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Content coming soon
In addition to the Campus Affiliates Program, which focuses on student research of Validated Independent News stories, the Project also supports direct student engagement in critical media literacy through other research programs that feed into the State of the Free Press yearbook series. These include student research on:
-Deja Vu News, deeply researched updates on developments in news stories highlighted in previous yearbooks’ Top 25 story lists. The past three State of the Free Press yearbooks have featured Deja Vu news updates, on topics such as microplastics pollution, voting restriction, and free speech issues on college campuses, by student interns from North Central College, working under the guidance of Dr. Steve Macek, chair of the North Central’s Department of Communication and Media Studies. A number of these student authors have gone on to pursue graduate degrees or employment in fields related to their areas of research.
–Junk Food News—building on a term originally coined by the Project’s founder, Carl Jensen, to describe sensational news stories that distract the public’s attention from more substantive and consequential issues, investigations of contemporary examples of “junk food news” compare and contrast “junk” stories with serious stories that took place in the same time frame but which received far less news coverage. The Junk Food News chapter in each yearbook is typically coauthored by students working in collaboration with Project Censored faculty. The experience in writing and publishing the Junk Food News chapter has helped many of these student-authors advance their education or successfully land their first jobs after graduation.
–News Abuse—A counterpart to “Junk Food News,” News Abuse refers to news stories of genuine significance that have been subject to biased interpretation (or “spin”) to the extent that the importance of the story is likely to be misunderstood. Analysis of “news abuse” as a form of propaganda provides students with a concrete way of appreciating the subtle influence of news “framing”—how news reporting directs where and how news consumers focus their attention.
Recent editions of the State of the Free Press yearbook series provide examples of research into Deja Vu News, Junk Food News, and News Abuse that teachers and their students can use as models for their own direct exploration of current news issues.
Professor Testimonials
Susan Rahman, Sociology, College of Marin and Sonoma State University
Julie Andrzejewski, Department of Human Relations and Multicultural Education, St. Cloud State University
Nolan Higdon is a history instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area
Kevin Howley, Media Studies, DePauw University
Michael I. Niman, Journalism & Critical Media Studies, State University of New York-Buffalo
