Earlier this month I taught a two-week course titled “Leadership and Media Literacy in The Age of Fake News and Big Data” for the Brown Leadership Institute. My first teaching job (way back in 2003!) was with a summer reading enrichment program for K-12 students, so it was fun to pick up teaching high school students again fifteen years (!) later. I wanted to reflect on some of the things I learned from this experience, since I know that some folks on Twitter seemed interested in the class. I’m not sharing the syllabus here because it has lots of “Leadership Institute” stuff in it that ties it pretty explicitly to the programs particular aims and pedagogical contexts. That being said, here are three major areas of inquiry for the course that I provided to parents, relatives, students, and my Leadership Institute colleagues at our session’s closing remarks:
The history of media and the long history of Fake News: We started with an overview of “pre-digital” media and data contexts by inventorying and describing popular forms of media and the material conditions informing their use and reception. A major component of this work involved collaborating with and talking to local archivists: specifically, Heather Cole at the John Hay Library and María Victoria Fernández at the John Carter Brown Library. Heather was gracious enough to show students a wide assemblage of archival materials relevant to the course’s investments in propaganda, activism, and small and large sites of circulation. Together we looked at copies of The Black Panther newspaper and Marvel’s Black Panther comic book, LGBTQAI zines, anti-slavery almanacs, and early attempts to falsely attribute work to William Shakespeare (documents that came with what they claimed were literal locks of hair from The Bard’s head!). María introduced us to the various challenges that the JCB faces in digitizing and disseminating its materials online, attempts to connect primary texts held by elite institutions to highly-trafficked, networked, and more accessible resources like Wikipedia, and ongoing efforts to consider the roles digital tools and their users might play in efforts to decolonize archival spaces.
We also discussed various attempts to misrepresent, falsify, deceive, or otherwise manipulate audiences in these pre-digital spaces (like the Shakespeare example), but to be honest we didn’t do as much of this as I’d originally planned (we discussed them in digital contexts). I’m halfway through Kevin Young’s Bunk and I think that book and other resources might give me some ideas if I revisit this topic.