Teaching Informational Competency in a Changing Political Media Environment

30 January 2023, Version 1
This content is an early or alternative research output and has not been peer-reviewed at the time of posting.

Abstract

We discuss teaching strategies designed to enhance students’ informational competency. Informational competency shares some of the broad goals of information literacy (IL), including for example, helping students develop the ability to identify, find, evaluate, and produce information. Our concept of informational competency differs in foreground the skills of democratic citizenship outside of the classroom and beyond research activities in the field. Students—citizens—who are informationally competent, not only possess information literacy, but they are also thoughtful curators of political news, intentional and reflective media consumers, and ethical and effective users of social media when it comes to receiving and sharing political information. We discuss strategies to guide students in undergraduate American government courses in cultivating habits of media consumption, developing the skills to evaluate political information and news, and maintaining a healthy skepticism alongside feelings of political trust in a shifting political media landscape.

Keywords

Information literacy
teaching and learning
media

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