Trumpnado Chasers: In the vortex of news literacy, Covid-19, and abruptly online classes

Brett Oppegaard

Teaching a “News Literacy” class during the Trump presidency was like trying to cross the Pacific Ocean in a dinghy during hurricane season. We met twice a week, but it always seemed like a month’s worth of chaos-fueled news had passed between our sessions. There were about 20 students enrolled – in the spring of 2020 at the University of Hawaii – mostly freshmen and sophomores, considering journalism as a major. Before this class, though, they rarely read any news. Not newspapers, not magazines, not books. Some of them watched journalism on television. Most of them used social media, typically Instagram, to feel “informed.”

A coronavirus outbreak in China near the start of the term, at first, seemed like just another wild gale. We had many competing crises already in circulation. I already had been requiring students to examine news reports circulating in left-wing, centrist, right-wing, and international channels, as a way to create an intellectual foundation for discussions of media bias but also to stress the importance of data triangulation. We started to pick up concerning Covid-19 reports in early to mid-February, which I initially used to discuss proximity as a news value. The closer a person physically is to an event, this value stresses, the more important it can seem to that person. If this outbreak was happening in Hawaii, I lectured, you would be very concerned.

Yet some students in the class were uneasy anyway about these accounts. I attributed their anxiousness to a lack of regular exposure to the daily horrors and tragedies of world events, shielded by their Instagram filters. As the reports kept growing in quantity in our class discussions of current events, I even used the topic as an example of how media “fear mongering” can work. This is why some people feel so scared about the world, I said, because of the amplification effects of prominent media channels.

A couple of weeks later, though, as I met with students right before our spring break, even my thickened skin was starting to feel some sense of unease. The day after our last class before the break, my university recommended moving all classes online for a few weeks, then, in quick succession, required it, then required it for the rest of the semester. I had to adapt fast, as did the students. I also saw an opportunity in this moment, though, in which experimental online pedagogy could be attempted, without as much risk of “waste of time” complaints. One resource all of us had in the weeks that followed was time.

So here is a sampling of the unusual ways I adjusted this class in response, generating my most important lessons confirmed about transforming a face-to-face class to a fully online version: I think a class works best when it feels personal and present but also as an ephemeral experience, fleeting in nature, and one that cannot be replicated by rote. An online class is not a computer program that just needs to be run. It is an infrastructure for human connectivity that needs to be nurtured on all sides of the Internet connection.

Instituting a Mental-Health Check: As a natural curiosity, when we returned from spring break and started the class online, I initially asked how everyone was doing. But then, and this was the important step, I had students rate their state of mind – in that moment – on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the greatest day of a person’s life, 5 being an average day, and 0 being the worst. I just had them type a number into our Slack (Slack.com) channel and said nothing more at the time. But after class, I went back to the Slack channel and looked at the numbers. Anyone with a number below a 5, I sent an individual email to that person and asked if there was anything I could do to help, or if that person wanted to talk about what was going on. Students genuinely seemed to appreciate that gesture and usually gave me some sort of broad explanation for the rating. After the impact that I saw it made, I asked the students that same question again each week for the rest of the semester, to look for patterns or persistent issues. The numbers fluctuated wildly for some, from 4 to 10 and back again. Others were steady, sometimes low, and sometimes medium, but never high.

Audio (and Text) Only: One of the most memorable classes I had in graduate school was one conducted entirely by smartphones, wherever we might be in that moment. One student, I recall, was at a grocery store. Another one was driving between cities. I went to a nearby park and sat by a beautiful lake. Our discussions in that class were vigorous and engaged, imbued with a sense of joy and freedom. So I asked my students in the spring of 2020 to not worry about creating a hostage-like video feed during the synchronous Zoom (Zoom.us) portions of our class. Audio-only was fine, and I saw evidence that this approach had its intended effects a few weeks into the experiment, when a student contributed a complicated and thorough response to one of my impromptu on-the-spot inquiries, then confided that he was lying comfortably in his bed and really enjoying this discussion.

Souping up Slack: I like using Slack as a classroom backchannel, because students easily can connect to each other in real time during classes, but they also asynchronously can use it at any time, before or after, to discuss issues and problem solve together, generating a record of academic product. When we came back from spring break, I had created some break-out channels for pairings and small-group discussions. These channels at first had names such as “Room 1,” but when we initially entered them in small groups, I asked the focus to turn to naming and describing that room as a shrine to the journalists we admired the most (and also as a way to build news literacy around those characters).

We already had other assignments in this class to learn about prominent journalists or famous writers/thinkers who practiced journalism, which led to the creation of, for example, these rooms called “Ida B. Wells Sanctuary,” the Karl “Marx Block,” and the George “Orwell Cafe.” But what surprised me was a coalescing of two groups of students, independently, around wildlife photographers Michael Nichols (“MichaelNicholsRoom”) and Paul Nicklen (“NicklensNook”). I had not heard of either of them before. This short activity – about 15 minutes for the students to decorate their rooms with creative textual descriptions in Slack –  also gave me a chance to learn with them about who these photographers were and what types of journalism they practiced.

Through this exercise, we playfully created a particular place of learning, not just an abstract online channel, and when we were in it together, we imagined this instantiation of NicklensNook, for example, as: a “tree house between redwoods. You stride through the large oak doors and see pictures covering every wall filled with Paul Nicklen’s adventures as a photojournalist for National Geographic. ... Face to face with humpbacks, polar bears, sperm whales, killer whales, brown bears, hundreds of dolphins, and the list goes on. … (The) glass tree house with bamboo floors … (has) a bowl of water for his dogs. … approaching (a) photo, you hear his voice begin to tell you what this experience was like (complemented by) subtle animal noises. You feel a slight breeze from the large windows coming in and feel warm sunlight hitting your face. There is a small counter with locally sourced coffee, tea, a pitcher of water and handmade mugs.” Each online room was filled by these students with such varied details, contributed as Slack posts, making it feel like a rich and inviting place of learning.

Once the rooms were thoroughly described, we played in them by describing our actions while exploring them. For example, in Nicklen’s Nook, one student wrote that she “glides up the mossy steps and is taken aback by what she sees. Pictures wilder than the imagination cover the walls. She gasps. Her dreams grow bigger with every photo she looks at.” Others started to expand the limits of this medium, beyond realism, with an innate understanding of media literacy, by using fantastical descriptions such as, after “his pet falcon drops him off, (the student strikes) the warrior pose and reflects on his time as a young boy in the wilderness.” And, another student “rides in on his pet camel and rushes up the steps, eager to take a look at the gallery. Relaxing and picturing himself on those same adventures.”

What will these students remember long-term about news literacy, or this class? I don’t know. But maybe they will think about everything we tried, including about Nicklen and his work. They will know that was not a part of the original plan but appreciate it anyway.