Arming students with critical thinking skills is essential in this digital era when screen time dominates and the dissemination of information (and misinformation) is constant. But how, exactly, do we do that?

In this episode of the Educator’s Playbook podcast, host Kimberly McGlonn taps into two experts to help empower K-12 students and educators to discern, analyze, and evaluate content and information in a never-ending news cycle.

She speaks first with Megan Fromm of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, an organization at the forefront of raising awareness about the importance of media literacy. Together, they unravel some of the complexities around teaching students to view the digital landscape through a critical lens until dissecting and discerning the content they encounter becomes reflexive. Then Kimberly is joined by #PennGSE associate professor Abby Reisman, who provides additional insight and effective strategies for instilling these essential skills in students. Abby focuses on document-based historical inquiry, a way of studying history where you look at original documents, like letters, diaries or newspaper articles from the past, to better understand and explore historical events and the people involved in them.

This episode is a deep dive into the intersection of education, critical thinking and the digital world, offering educators tangible strategies and insights to empower the next generation of critical thinkers.

GUESTS:

• Megan Fromm, Education Manager, National Association for Media Literacy Education
• Abby Reisman, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

NEWSLETTER:

• Subscribe to the Educator's Playbook newsletter for ongoing resources and content

RELATED PLAYBOOKS:

• No. 49: How to make the most of teaching history online
• No. 13: Teaching students to think like historians

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

• National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)
• News Literacy Project
• Project Look Sharp
• Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island
• Stanford History Education Group
• History-Social Science Project at UC Berkeley
• UCLA History-Geography Project, part of the California History Social Science Project

What's salient? What's the story? What's the question you're asking?

This is the Educator's Playbook from the Penn Graduate School of Education. As educators, we know our jobs are to help prepare our students for the real world, to help give them the knowledge and the skills to apply that knowledge when they leave our classrooms. It's estimated that the average American spends seven hours and 11 minutes a day looking at a screen. That's nearly a third of our day or close to 110 days of any given year. That's a lot. And in the age of the internet and social media, where a constant stream of information and misinformation has become part of daily life, it's more important than ever that our students learn critical thinking and critical reading skills.

In this episode of the Educator's Playbook podcast, we're investigating how we can cut through all that noise and how to effectively teach students how to dissect the things they see and read and hear. I'm joined now by Megan Fromm of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. It's a national organization working to bring attention to this issue of media literacy and to promote education on the topic. Megan, can you please introduce yourself to our listening audience?

Absolutely. So my name is Megan Fromm and I'm the education manager for the National Association for Media Literacy Education. And we are a nonprofit group with about 8,000 members, from teachers, to librarians, to media producers, to tech companies, anybody who is interested in making sure that students and young people, and let's be honest, all people receive media literacy education are part of our membership.

So let's just jump in and get some definitions out of the way. How do you define media and what all does that term cover?

Oh, that is such a great question. I love that. There's a lot of conflation in this education space and in the tech space and in media space about this idea of media. And I think for one, people say the media, like it's a holistic, monolithic thing. And it's really not, right? So media represents the multitude of ways that we receive information or entertainment or any kind of communication that really isn't firsthand. So if it doesn't come face-to-face, it's mediated. And so we're experiencing a message, an idea through something other than interpersonal interaction.

And so it really represents a wide range of things. Tools, platforms, publications, innovative techniques, all of that could be under media in addition to the things we traditionally think about, books, magazines, newspapers, podcasts, all of that.

I think about the work that you're doing as an association to really, I think, advance people's understanding of that definition of media, but also what their relationship with being media literate is, which there's a space there between being able to consume media and actually having some sense of literacy. What is media literacy?

We think of media literacy as the ability for people to engage with media in a multitude of ways. So we're thinking about, can we access information? Can we analyze it? Can we evaluate it? Can we create our own forms of communication? And can we act based on all of those experiences and interactions? And certainly, I think media literacy covers some sub literacies, like news literacy is specifically dealing with news and journalism in the same way, or digital literacy might be looking at how we look at digital tools or experience digital communications.

So media literacy is really this umbrella that asks, how do we come to understand our media experiences in a way that's based on logic, a process, understanding ourselves, and then feeling confident enough to do something with that information?

You pulled in the social part of literacy and the emotional part of literacy and then the cognitive part of literacy. And when I think about my own time in the classroom as an English educator, I remember how challenging it was to figure out how to approach teaching all of those facets. How do we as a community of educators in this moment teach media literacy?

How we teach media literacy has become a million-dollar question. And I mean that quite literally. There is millions of dollars being spent by organizations and journalism groups and universities trying to figure this out, because we're at a critical mass where we understand we probably should have been doing this much earlier, decades ago.

Big facts.

And we're also experiencing some mind shifts, I think, in terms of what the research tells us about media literacy education. So when you put all that in context with our education system... And I've taught high school English and high school journalism.

What?

Yeah, it was awesome. I love... Oh, high school students are great. And high school student journalists, top-notch. But when we put those things in context with an education system where our educators are overworked and underpaid and struggling every day to teach everything that they have to teach, it is a critical call for action. Right? And so I think some of the things that are concerning us as an organization when we think about what does this look like and what does it mean is, how do we infuse media literacy throughout every subject area?

It used to be perhaps more expected to think, "Oh, well, let's just have a class for media literacy in the same way that you might have a library class, library sciences." And we know now that it's much better and more effective to have media literacy spread throughout a student's experience. That way, it's authentic, they're getting it in context of the subject matter, and they're getting it all the time. Because media changes, right? Technologies change. If we imagine media literacy education as a one and done, then we're probably not going to be doing it in a way that serves us for the long haul. So I think some of those considerations are really top of mind right now.

Are there any places where you think there are some really rich resources that can be supportive to teachers?

Absolutely. There are a ton of great groups doing media literacy education. And our philosophy at NAMLE is, how many people can we possibly invite to this party? Let's just invite more, right? Because as an organization that is really concerned with educators, we know that every educator is going to have a different need. So we have resources, we have the core principles for media literacy education. That is a document that's really for teachers.

So when a teacher is thinking about what does media literacy education mean, what are the values of media literacy education, they can look at that. And it's about pedagogy and practice. And then there are other organizations that are doing really excellent student facing resources, so like lesson plans and activities. Some ones that come to mind are the News Literacy Project. They do wonderful classroom focused things. Project Look Sharp, which is a great organization out of New York, and they're doing excellent lesson plans for all ages K through 12.

University of Rhode Island has a media education lab that puts out a ton of wonderful resources. So we're seeing a lot of grassroots, state specific or region specific organizations that are also doing this work. And that's awesome there's so much. And then what we want to do collectively as a community is help teachers sift through that.

Do you think that the teaching of media literacy is just for the humanities, or where does it fall?

It's a double-edged sword to say we really believe it's every teacher's job. Just like every class can be a civics class. These things that know no boundaries in terms of how we connect with each other and how we act within the world and how we find our space. Those are the domain of every classroom, of every grade in every school. And that I think is part of what makes us feel really overwhelming. And we like to encourage teachers to just start where you're at. Media literacy is a lifetime commitment in the same way that our health is. Right?

I mean, if I go to the gym five times, I might feel good about myself. But over the course of 50 years, I don't know what that means. If I only think critically about the media that I consume in 11th grade but I don't continue to do that, what does that mean? And so we really want teachers to give themselves permission to start wherever they're at and to just build in media literacy moments. And those can be quick and easy and built on top of what they already do. If I'm a science teacher and I'm looking at my biology curriculum that has things about cells or evolution or things like that, bringing in a contemporary article that is looking at new research, that's a media literacy moment.

Teachers are already doing this. They're just often not calling it media literacy. And so the more that we frame it as like, "Yes, you're actually focusing on media literacy skills here," then I think we'll develop that consciousness about what we're doing.

Yeah. And I think we'll figure out new ways to just acknowledge the ways it's already embedded, which will continue to-

Absolutely.

... feed the momentum of being mindful of how making sure that our students can think critically and read the media critically is a major part of what we need to give them in order to help them to just navigate the world. Which is such a tricky place because of things like Wikipedia and ChatGPT and even Google. So how do we in this age of misinformation teach students what sources are reliable?

That is the question that we've certainly been dealing with most in the last year. Most people are really focused on this idea of quality information, and rightly so, right? We've seen how it impacts democracy and it impacts community trust and the way we see the world. And so I think what's important is that when we talk about quality information, nuance is so important. It's all about nuance. Right? And so thinking very specifically about the message in front of you is perhaps the single greatest media literacy habit versus, for example, trying to make blanket statements about an entire website or an entire news publication.

And so thinking about, okay, who is this coming from? What is the purpose of this individual message? Is this actual message meant to inform or is this opinion? Is it meant to incite or entertain? This is important, right? Because any given 24 hour news show is doing opinion and news all the time. And they mix together and they're not easy to identify. So when we start by just dealing with the message in front of us, I think that's when we can start to build those habits.

That notion of habits, I think, is a really interesting way of framing what will be and what is an emerging life skill essentially, which is like how are we reading media at large, but even more narrowly, how are we reading social media and how are we helping our students to be able to do what you're talking about, which is to spot an advertisement over something that might be positioned to be true? So how do we teach students that other life skill of just how to have a healthy relationship with social media and to be responsible in terms of how they're navigating both the consumption of social media, but also the production of content?

Right. There's been a lot of press lately. For example, there was the Surgeon General's warning about social media. And there's been a lot of discussion, I think, really focused on the dangers, and it's kind of like this protective, like we must keep young people from social media. In my experience with the young people that I've worked with, they get that, but they're so much more in tuned with the benefits of using social media that they have perhaps a little more balanced perspective. So I think that that's the first thing I would say is, reports and studies are typically meant to generalize.

And if we as educators can remind ourselves to just work with the students we have versus applying general perspectives, I think that'll be more helpful. So if we keep that in mind, then I think the next really important tool is reflection. So asking our students to maybe spend three or four days keeping a journal of when they go on social media, how do they feel? Like how do they feel before they go on? Number one. How do they feel after they're done, whether it's two minutes or two hours? And that act, that very simple act of reflection is so insightful for anybody to figure out how media is affecting them, their mental health, their social wellbeing. Because they can look back and they can say, "Oh, I was agitated, so I picked up my phone and I saw cat videos for five minutes and I felt better." Or, "I was bored, and then I scrolled for two hours and then I felt worse about myself."

So I think those two things. Thinking specifically about the students in front of us, and then asking them to engage in personal reflection with their media use are two really good tools.

I think that's so concrete and so helpful. I think it's such a practical way of building a relationship within ourselves and our relationship with social media, but also as facilitators of learning, how do we cultivate a different kind of relationship, one that's based on awareness with our students and within our students.

100%. If people were to ask me, "Where do I start in my classroom?" It's reflection, it's awareness. And we are part of that too. Right? And so whenever I teach media literacy or I know I'm going to have a media literacy moment, I'm really frank with my students, because I like to think of media literacy as like a judgment free zone. The fact that I might have watched, again, 20 minutes of cat videos, it's really like neither here nor there. Like, it's who I am. I love cats. It brings me some joy. And I, as a person, in this field can remove judgment from that.

But young people experience a lot of judgment for their media use. And so if we can join the party and say like, "Hey, we all use media sometimes in mindful ways, sometimes in totally mindless, zombie ways," then I think that it makes them more open to reflect, more open to share, and to think honestly for themselves in that assessment without that fear of judgment or shame that they might be getting about their media habits.

That's really, really helpful. What would you like our listeners to know about why media literacy is such an important skill for students to develop?

Yeah. And I'm sure you would get lots of different answers for this. I mean, we could talk about democracy, we could talk about intellect and things like that. But for me, it boils down to understanding our space in the world. And that is what teaching to me is all about. It is helping my students navigate and empower themselves to have space in this world, when they can understand messages that are coming at them, when they can think through how they can also use messages to create space. I think that's really empowering. And so for me, I look at it as just a simple exercise, like most teaching, to give our students power in the world.

Thank you so much, Megan, for joining us today on The Educator's Playbook.

Absolutely. Thanks so much. Great questions. This was fun.

Thank you so much to Megan for joining me on the podcast. Now we turn to Abby Reisman, an associate professor at Penn GSE. She focuses on using document-based inquiry to teach history, and how that can better prepare students to interpret the world around them. Abby, welcome. Let these good people know who you are.

Absolutely.

And what you do.

Okay. My name is Abby Reisman. I am an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. My work is in the teaching and learning of history. It means that I study how teachers teach history in classrooms, how students think about history in classrooms. And specifically, my work looks at how teachers can design classroom experiences that are intellectually stimulating, that engage students in thinking about the past, that get them to talk to one another and see that history is an interpretation, it's really a story, it's how we talk about ourselves, it's how we talk about our communities. And I think classrooms should convey that.

So I was an English teacher in a co-taught class with a history teacher for 18 years. And it was a really interesting commitment and investment into putting two teachers into shared space for 90 minutes with 50 freshmen to teach about colonialism. This is how we study the world. And we would read something in literature, and then the history teacher would chime in. She would teach something about history. And then I would chime in and how it connected to the literature. It was a really well curated experience and exercise in both co-teaching and what it means to be a reflective practitioner and what it means to use simulations like mock trials.

And I know, in your research, you're interested in using document-based historical inquiry exercises, questions, approaches, as a way of grounding the study of the stories of the past, history, in things that are engaging. So how do you define what this notion of document-based inquiry is? And how it can be used as a tool for having those nuanced conversations about hard things?

Yeah. So I think the first place to start is to draw a distinction between what the past is and what history is. The starting place of all of this is to say, the past happened. Because the past is just the present with some time added to it. And history is the story we want to tell about the past, or it's how we tell the story. We're making choices about who the main character is in our story, what the plot is of our story, what the setting is of our story.

The conflicts.

What evidence we're going to look at. I'm looking at the Times, you're looking at Twitter, or who knows, right? That's not to say that you wouldn't also look at the Times, but you're making choices about what's salient? What's the story? What's the question you're asking? That's history, right? History is the writing about the past. But it's also the selection about what we want to write about the past. So that's the first step in setting up a classroom that invites students to engage in historical interpretation.

So then, we could say to students, and people do and try, "Hey, students, what's a question you have about, let's say, the 1920s?" And students might say, "What was life like for African-Americans in New York City?" And you could be like, "That's a great question, kids. Okay, what evidence should we look for?" And they might say, dah, dah, dah. Maybe eventually they'd be like, "The Schomburg would be a good place to go. Let's go to the Schomburg." They take a class trip to the Schomburg, they spend a month there. Maybe they get some hotel space in New York City, see some shows on the side, and then the students do authentic inquiry. That would be an extraordinary experience.

And I don't want to dissuade people who have the capacity and the school structures and the administrative support who could do something like that. But I don't think that's actually possible for the majority of teachers and for the majority of students and for the majority of schools. And so what the document-based lesson is, is really, what is the smallest unit that we can design in a classroom where the bell's going to ring in 42 minutes? How do you get all that in, in a way where students are still authentically trying to answer a real question like, "Gosh, what was life like for African-Americans in the 1920s?" That's what the document-based lesson is.

And so you need that question, and it needs to be formulated in a way that makes it a good and answerable question, that's aligned to the evidence that you have available that you can give to kids in a way that's accessible to them. The teacher has to get them some background about the great migration and some understanding of... But you could do that in 10 minutes.

The before.

The before. The setup. And then the teacher, I think, in a good document-based lesson, doesn't just give them a stapled packet of documents and say, "Hey, kids, what do you think?" Kind of tries to take them on a journey. Maybe the first round of evidence would be like, "Wow. For folks coming up from the South, New York was an exciting place." Maybe round two is like, "Oh, but wait a minute. There's still discrimination." Maybe round three is like, "Wow. But there's this..."

Art scene that's emerging.

"Art scene and it's emerging." Right? And so you organize the evidence around these themes, and then you have classroom discussion that pulls them out. And then at the end, you say, "So what do you think? Was it a good place to be? What's Harlem like now in New York City?" Et cetera. There's all sorts of ways to go and to make it meaningful to today.

For anyone who wants to incorporate this approach into their lesson plans, how do they do that? Thinking about the fact that time is short, that days are full, that obligations are many, how do they do it? Where do they go?

The first place I would tell teachers to go is the Stanford History Education Group website, because the reading like a historian curriculum has now, at this point, I think close to 200 standalone document-based lessons, and they're all free.

That's wonderful.

There are other projects though, I direct students to. Berkeley has the History-Social Science Project, or UCLA has the History-Geography Project. But there are now a lot of document-based lessons online.

If you don't use those resources, that's what you'd be essentially curating.

That's right. That's right. And it takes a lot of work.

A lot of research.

A lot of research. Research that teachers don't have time to do.

Typically. No.

So I, for years, would support teachers in designing their own document-based lessons. I still think it's important to understand the design principles, to understand how you could find a document. Let's say it's 30 pages long, a speech by whoever. You need to make that into 200 words and 14 point font with a nice chunky source note on top so students know who it is. So there's a lot of design work that teachers should know how to do. But in an ideal world, they're tweaking existing materials and not starting something from scratch.

How would they know what to look for in those documents? How do you know how to find a gem or a nugget in a document?

That's such a good question. There are a couple of things to look for. First of all, at bare minimum, it has to answer the question on some level.

It has to offer an answer.

An answer.

Yeah. Not the answer.

No, it'll never be the answer.

Right.

And ideally, there has to be some tension embedded in the document itself. So, does the document have a clear answer? But then you look at who wrote it, and it's somebody who is from X perspective or works for X company or has a vested interest in why. So something that leads you to perhaps not fully trust their reliability.

To push back, to question.

Push back. The push back. So that embedded tension. That could be in the person's perspective. It could also be in the text itself. Like, "Wait a minute. They're so clear here. But here, they have this caveat. What's that about? They're really vague here." So it could be in the close reading. There's something amiss in the text that you can pull out through discourse. And so students who are starting to formulate a take or an argument or an interpretation based on that text could be pushed back on by their classmates who say, "But wait a minute, what about this piece here?"

But you also want to think of it as a set among the other documents in the lesson, how is it interacting with the other pieces? What are the tensions between them? And then you also want to think about the sequence. So, I'm thinking of an example. I did a lesson recently. This is on the Stanford History Education website on why were some white women in the 19 teens against the movement for suffrage for women. It makes absolutely no sense. Why? So first round is like, "Well, they're saying that this isn't the time to do it. It's World War I. We need to support the president." Okay. But that doesn't totally add up. Let's go to round two, because they were against it for decades before World War I.

Okay. There's all these documents about how... It's not feminine. Right? Women don't have the knowledge to do this. They should stay these crazy suffragists who want to wreck the house, et cetera. Okay, that adds up. Right? Okay, that makes sense. That there's this notion of respectability. Who knows? Then you go to round three and you're like, "Oh, okay. But if women get the right to vote in the 19, that means black women get the right to vote." And if black women get the right to vote, suddenly we have a total shift of the voting demographics in the South.

You could say it always comes back to race in this country. And I think that there's an argument to be made about it. But the point is, I would never put that third round first, because I'm also thinking about the journey kids are taking. So they're deepening and deepening and deepening. Now, are there kids who in round one would be like, "It's obviously the race, they learned about the 15th amendment. They know that." Yeah, but that's okay.

Yeah. That's okay.

So then they bring it in and be like, "Do you have evidence for that?" I don't know.

I mean, I think that that gets to the power that history has to not just find the answer, but to cultivate the question asking, which is what makes students not just critical readers, which is of course important, but more conscious citizens, right? They're just generally more thoughtful. They can read between the lines, reread the lines, remove the lines, reorder the lines. And I think too, this journey that we're on as educators to get students to learn about history in ways that help them to make sense of current events, what have you learned about how we can do that bit?

There are four reading skills or historical reasoning skills that we embed in document-based lessons that I think are directly transferable and map onto, I think, the ways of thinking that we want students to engage with in their daily life as they navigate contemporary contentious issues, as they seek their own answers to whatever questions they may have. So one is sourcing. You have to source the document. Who wrote it? When did they write it? Why did they write it? What's their perspective? What's their angle?

Who's the bias?

Who's paying them? Two is, what do other people say? So corroborating, right? You never want to rely on one source. And that's why I always tell students, "I know you only have 42 minutes." When I say students, I mean teachers because those are my students. "You don't have to have five documents, but you need to have more than one." Because the whole point is you're troubling the notion that there's a single authoritative text. That's the assumption, right? When you think history, you think textbook. And textbook is really a metaphor for the dominant narrative, for the single narrative, the one that's troubling so many people right now. Right? "What are you doing? Making my kid uncomfortable. I raised them to think X." And so you need to have at least two documents.

Now, you can have the textbook in another document. You start there. And we just did this lesson in class. A textbook about the March on Washington for middle schoolers. What does it say? Guess who the hero is? There's two people who are the heroes.

It would have to be either Dr. King, who...

No, you got it. That's one, for sure.

Right? Or it'd have to be Lyndon B. Johnson who acted on the March.

Yes.

Right?

So it's Kennedy.

It's Kennedy.

Put Kennedy there.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's exactly right. Right? So it starts with Kennedy. Kennedy supported this thing. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech. So you ask kids, "Hey, who was responsible for organizing the March?" Well, Kennedy. It's obvious. We have it right here. Or who spoke at the March on Washington? This is easy. Martin Luther King. Then you just show them in the program.

And you see all the people.

18, 19 speakers.

Right. Right.

Right?

Right.

Who are they? He's number 16 out of 18.

He wasn't the first or last.

He wasn't the first or the last. Exactly. So you trouble that, and then it just opens... You can't do it all. It's fifth period on a Tuesday. You know what I mean?

That's real.

But you just break it open. So you got sourcing, you got corroboration. And then you got close reading. Right? So you're looking at it carefully. Like why are they wording it this way? And there's a lot of great stuff happening now. I think close reading is starting to infiltrate, popular culture people are noticing how headlines are written, who's given agency, who's protected, who's the bad guy, who's the good guy? I mean, it's always happened. Right?

Yeah.

But I think those are the skills that you need for civic participation. And so I think there's direct transfer.

For sure. Even that example of Dr. King and JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson, it reveals to me just how much American history is just full of these really difficult topics to piece and parcel out particularly this notion of hero/villain. And over the past few years in particular, I think we've culturally... It's undeniable that we've seen this increase in bills and in policies which have been enacted to essentially restrict what topics can be covered in history class. By whom? When? How? How do you think that document-based inquiry as an approach can be used to help teachers navigate that landscape? Is it an way versus the way?

I think it's the way. So I have two different answers, and they're not really reconcilable. There's one answer that I have that's the one I want to give, which is that I want teachers to put on the noise-canceling headphones and keep on keeping on. There's a report from RAND that came out, I think last year, maybe the year before, called Walking on Eggshells. One of the findings, I think, that's most interesting there is that teachers experience unease, fear, intimidation, even in states where there are absolutely no laws in place.

I mean, I felt that way. Teaching about colonialism to ninth graders. We were talking about why did European countries leave Europe? Where did they go? What did they take and what did they leave? And then looking at how does that play out in Rwanda, in places like India and Afghanistan. Even this idea of not even calling it post-colonialism, just sitting colonialism out as the anchor term to describe the state of affairs in places like the history of Kenya or the history of, I don't know, we looked at Nigeria.

Exactly.

And this is in Pennsylvania, right? A state where there aren't...

It's not such as [inaudible 00:30:31] Yeah. Yeah. But you freak out, right?

Because you know that every time you push back on accepted notions, that you are potentially triggering someone else's notion of what is true.

That's right.

And what is important.

So I guess the second part of that is, I know it's real. I think there's a report just now of a teacher who was fired for assigning Anne Frank's diary. There's some real scary stuff. There are book burnings.

I saw that, in Missouri.

It's real. I'm going to give you a wishlist instead.

That's good. Well, I'll take it.

I want administrators to step up. I think every school leader, every educational leader at all levels should feel it their obligation first and foremost to protect teachers, to let teachers do their job. Now, if they want teachers to change this or change that, okay. You do your PD in your school, figure out what your mission is, what you want to do. But your role is to protect teachers, to have their back.

To make them feel protected.

To make them feel protected, to let them do their job. So that's the two sides of this issue. If I had one message to blast out there, it would be that. Because I feel like teachers don't feel like people have their back. Having said that, what is a teacher to do?

I was just going to say, what is your advice to them?

I think what document-based lessons allow is evidence-based argumentation, evidence-based interpretation. One of the things that's so clear to me, since I was a teacher, but it's especially clear now that I have this six-year-old, is that kids are so capable of tolerating complexity and nuance. They get it. I think if we step back and look at what's happening in schools, it's the parents freaking out. Even the narratives. The students you taught, I think they knew how to handle colonialism. I don't think it was their edifice that was getting deconstructed. It was their parents.

And I think we need history education for adults. I think that there needs to be some forum where adults learn about their past. But I think kids can do it. And I think teachers know that kids can do it. And I think when they do it, they love school and they love learning, and they're hungry for more knowledge. And that's the goal of the whole enterprise. So I am very hopeful about our youth and about our teachers.

Yeah. I think this idea of how do we cultivate a way of looking back with nuance is a way of imagining radical and radically inspiring futures.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you so much for being in conversation-

Thanks.

... with us today on the Playbook.

That was great.

Thanks again, Abby, for coming in to speak with me. The modern media and information landscape is messy, so I really appreciate both of our guests' expertise. With something as broad and overarching as critical thinking, it can be difficult to distill it down to a concrete single lesson. So it's important to remember that this is a skill that needs to be practiced throughout our students' lives, and our own too.

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This podcast is produced by Amy Carson. Our mix engineer is Justin Berger. Christopher Plant is RADIOKISMET's head of operations. And Ben Geise is our project manager. Matthew Vlahos is our executive producer. And I'm your host, Kimberly McGlonn. Thanks so much for listening. This has been Educator's Playbook.