Team Teaching American Media in a Virtual Classroom

According to Yousman (2017), media literacy in higher education is “often the last opportunity for individuals to develop media competencies in a formal setting” (p. 36). Without this formalized approach to learning media literacy, students miss out on opportunities to critically evaluate their media consumption and understand the role media plays in their own social, cultural, and educational lives. This session will focus on how two instructors at a regional college with limited resources team-taught an online course exploring American Media by adapting a required Global Issues class. In this course the instructors asked students to consider newsworthiness, bias, media ownership, cancel culture, and popular news themes. Lessons included surveys, videos, podcasts, and readings from The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone. In groups, students responded to weekly discussions, evaluated with a rubric that encouraged them to engage in a conversation with their peers. As the semester progressed, the critical thinking within these discussions became much more evident and demonstrated that students were not only analyzing course materials through the lenses we were establishing but also using these skills to examine current events. Presenters will demonstrate use of technology for instructor collaboration, various pedagogical and technological methods for delivering course materials, and strategies for accommodating a diverse population of students, particularly with the varying challenges posed by the pandemic. We will include examples of lessons and technologies that can be easily implemented by other instructors, samples of student responses that show growth throughout the semester, and a bibliography of resources