Children are being exposed to more and more complex, divisive, and sometimes even false, information as South Australian teacher David Gregory has experienced recently at his school.
“I heard them talking to other students in the class saying about how the COVID vaccines can kill you,” says Gregory.
Engagement and Participation Officer for the Commissioner of Children and Young People in South Australia Nicola Moore is having similar conversations with the young people she exchanges with.
“I’ve been in a few conversations recently where young people might say that COVID isn’t real, so you kind of have these little titbits of young people where they’ll be talking that you can kind of directly see the impact of misinformation,” says Moore.
Online misinformation is creating new challenges for educators and policymakers as they try to play catch up with the internet. Senior lecturer in Media and Communication at Western Sydney University Doctor Tanya Notley is concerned that media literacy isn’t being taught enough in Australian schools.
A recent WSU survey revealed only one in five young people had had any lessons in school to help them think critically about the news in the past year.
“That really tells us that perhaps young people are not getting enough support to critically engage with news across the curriculum,” says Notley.
David says it can be extremely tough for teachers, with the politics of the day mounting more and more pressure on teachers to overperform and fix complex issues that need to be tackled from higher up.
“I already spend my entire day teaching students to be critical thinkers and active consumers of digital content, and our curriculum is extremely crowded.”
Parents are also susceptible to misinformation, which they can then pass onto their children, and this can be tricky to navigate as a teacher.
“You don’t want to create conflict between yourself and the parent, but primarily you don’t want to create conflict between the student and their parent. You have to be incredibly sensitive.”
Moore says we shouldn’t shy away from exposing young people to politics and is optimistic that better education mechanisms will help young people make a difference.
“We talk about change a lot when we talk about young people and that’s because they have this combination of a critical eye and a hopeful heart, and that combination often brings about change.”
