My chapter on education is primarily composed of a 10-minute documentary and so this short text is supplementary to my findings presented in the form of this film:
Parts of the documentary shot with the Transition Years and teachers of Bishopstown Community School came about through the practical delivery of a workshop on Fake News and basic verification tools (such as reverse searching an image using Google images) conducted as part of my research.
I used resources such as First Draft’s guide to image verification and simplified versions of coursework I deliver to First Year BA students of Journalism in Griffith College to guide them through a hands-on workshop. I requested permission from the school for the students to be allowed to use their smartphones to conduct exercises on the premise that the student’s devices are their main source of information; smartphone saturation for 15-35 year-olds in Ireland is at over 96% and I think it’s important that that be reflected in the skills being taught.
My conclusion through working with this age group is that they are, in the main, technologically very adept but with little understanding of underlying skills of critical analysis and scepticism. It pointed towards a need for reform of the educational system to reflect the realities of life for children and teens who have a high level of internet access from a young age: the Irish school curriculum is outdated and isn’t utilising the available tools in a formalised way to teach skills of digital citizenship, critical thought and philosophy.
New modular components should be introduced to enrich the current curriculum and all of my interviewees were in agreement that these changes should most probably be introduced at a primary level, when many children are given their first mobile devices.
Educational measures aimed at the general population can give people the skills to identify and reward good media reporting, as well as teaching good practice when it comes to social media sharing. But education for media professionals must also be examined, my work on this documentary has shown. There’s a differentiation to be made between formal training in the form of third-level courses for media students and informal, on-the-job, continuous in-house training for working journalists.
The current pressure in educational institutes to teach practical skills to students to make them work-ready and the increasing pressure on journalists to be able to produce multi-platform content has, it seems, driven third-level courses in the direction of teaching digital multi-media skills, videography, audio editing, photo editing and the like. Yet these are practical skills that are best acquired through practice.
Editors working with interns and new staff frequently bemoan the fact that digital natives are emerging into the workplace with many technological skills, but without many journalistic basics.
As Eoghan MacSweeney and Rachel Andrews pointed out, though, financial pressures on newsrooms are altering working practice and removing the previous strong mentorship element of an editor’s role.
In terms of third-level education, then, a rebalancing of course content in favour of theory, ethics and philosophical framing of the media industry seems advisable. It isn’t that the technological skillsets aren’t of value, but there needs to be a more solid grounding in theory to balance the practice. Then, once journalists are in the workplace they need to be resourced to have regular in-house training sessions, or else publications could consider pairing young journalists with more senior staff to enable the strengthening of the newsroom culture.