Students will learn about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including surrounding conspiracy theories, to explore the deeply ingrained American tendency to mistrust government – a characteristic of our national political culture that is as old as the Revolution.
Media and News Literacy
Posted inLesson Plan
Lesson Plan: Online All the Time? Researchers Predicted It.
Students will learn about behaviorism and the method of learning called operant conditioning that was developed by B.F. Skinner in the 1960s, and will explore why social media psychology makes that work highly relevant today.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: The Rise of Political Memes
Students will learn about political cartoons and how today’s version — memes — are being used across social media.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: News Media and Politics
Students will hear how the nation’s leading reporters and media figures who covered Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign offer a candid critique of their role in the former president’s rise to power.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: The Media’s Role in Campaign Coverage
Students will hear how the nation’s leading reporters and media figures who covered Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign offer a candid critique of their role in the former president’s rise to power.
Posted inU.S. History
Lesson Plan: Media Literacy and the Lost Cause Narrative
What happens when history is written not by the victors, but the losers? After the Civil War, the United States began the difficult process of reuniting and healing after four years of brutal conflict and centuries of Black enslavement. During this process of Reconstruction, the question arose for former Confederates of how to remember the Civil War and its causes. In an attempt to justify their actions, white Southerners created a historical narrative of the Civil War known as the Lost Cause. This romanticized version of historical events has since been largely discredited by historians. Nonetheless, the impact of this collective regional memory remains. In this activity, students will apply a fact-checking process to the six key tenets of the Lost Cause narrative.
Posted inLaw and Public Policy
Lesson Plan: Intro to Fact-Checking
Students will learn about the methods professional news organizations and historians use to check facts and how that applies to their own work.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: Health Risks of Vaping
Students will learn that like cigarette manufacturers decades ago, e-cigarette makers have pitched their products as fun and safe. But nobody knows what the risks of vaping are.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: McCarthyism – Populism and the Press
Students will learn how Joseph McCarthy rode to power on a wave of anti-communist fears, and how television contributed to both his rise and fall.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: Challenges to World Press Freedom
Nelson Rauda is a journalist in El Salvador. Rauda discusses how President Nayib Bukele is restricting press freedom and the implications of these restrictions for the government and civil society in El Salvador. In this lesson, students will study the meaning of press freedom, compare press freedoms in various countries across the globe, and draw their own opinions about the importance of press freedom.
