Fresno State professor: Media literacy can help young people improve mental health | Opinion

Last fall, Gov. Newsom signed Assembly Bill 873 into law, requiring California schools to teach media literacy in grades K-12.

The next step, as directed by the bill, is that California’s Instructional Quality Commission will incorporate media literacy content into English, science, social studies and math frameworks when those frameworks are next revised.

Ultimately it will be up to the state’s some 939 school districts to implement the policy. Individual schools and teachers will have a big say in which parts of the “media literacy” concept get emphasized.

It’s a situation I can relate to.

Last fall was my first semester at Fresno State, and I was tasked with developing the Media, Communications, & Journalism department’s new news & media literacy course.

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Fresh out of my Ph.D. program in media and mass communication, I was faced with tough choices. The concept of “media literacy” can mean a lot, from being able to spot deep fakes to knowing who owns the local newspaper to the biochemistry of how our bodies react to media.

I landed on two central themes, and a few semesters into teaching the class I still feel good about them. A shortcoming of AB 873 is that it doesn’t include funding to train teachers, so here’s my free curriculum advice to future media literacy educators across Fresno County.

I start off with media literacy as the art of not letting the media make you more sad, anxious, depressed, isolated, or angry than you need to be.

This media-literacy-as-positive-mental-health-praxis is what our young people need most right now. These are troubled generations, and their interactions with the media, news, and social media too often make their mental states (much) worse.

The majority of college students today meet the criteria for at least one mental health issue, according to the National Education Association. More and more adolescents are reporting mental health issues, according to the CDC. One in five U.S. children ages 3–17 has a mental, emotional, behavioral or developmental disorder, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

It’s a crisis out there. And the media is in the middle of a lot of it.

I buy into the theory from evolutionary psychology that us contemporary humans are an animal maladapted to the stimuli of this modern world. It’s like drinking from a fire hose of information, and somehow all the information getting in, and expecting our brains not to burst.

My students do things like audits of their social media usage. They reflect on how the media frames people like them (whoever they are). They write about their core values, and then do experiments on themselves, discovering which media helps them best live those values.

The hope is they leave the course with a healthier relationship with the media, news, and social media they consume.

The second focus of the course is on what I’ll call pro-social civic engagement. This is a generation born into a world of recessions, war, pandemics and toxic political dialogue. I want our young people to see how they can use the media to create a better world.

AB 873 defines media literacy, in part, as the ability to use media as a digital citizen. Similarly, the National Association of Media Literacy Education emphasizes creating and acting using all forms of communication in its vision for media literacy skills held by all citizens.

There’s no better place for students to create and act than their own communities.

I teach my students to use the tools of media to make a positive impact. They learn how to engage with local government officials and news outlets online, how to research facts, science and solutions, and how to construct media that tells a social story.

They lean into their generative instincts and end up creating inspiring stuff: websites, videos, podcasts and fliers, advocating for revitalizing local parks, organizing for mandatory air conditioning for local renters, better student counseling at the school they recently graduated from, and even better roach abatement programs in Fresno. Media literacy partners extremely well with civic literacy.

AB 873 is a good thing. Our students need media literacy skills. By focusing media literacy curriculum on mental health and pro-social civic engagement, we can help our students — and ourselves — to be all want of them: connected, useful, and sane.

Dr. Jesse Scaccia teaches media literacy and writing courses in the Media, Communications, & Journalism department at Fresno State. He also teaches writing courses in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.