19 Feb 2025 Digital media literacy: Important lessons from a climate change classroom

Dina Gilio-Whitaker

There is an old adage that the best way to really learn about a subject is to teach it. I would agree but with a caveat: one must begin with at least a baseline understanding of the topic at hand. Such was the case when I set out to teach for the first time a course on climate change in an undergraduate American Indian studies (AIS) course called Climate Change and Indigenous People.

My scholarly background is in American Indian studies with a specialty in environmental justice (which I’ve written a popular book about), and climate change and climate justice are closely related topics. As a researcher and writer, I also have an extensive background in journalism. It was thus logical to bring together all these elements as a methodological approach to teaching the course, but it was not obvious to me at the beginning. In the process of shaping the class, I learned three important lessons: media literacy is crucial to student learning about climate change; how they learn it matters; and most importantly, that they come to conclusions on their own. My hope is that readers will find these insights valuable in their own teaching and writing.

First, some background. I teach at California State University San Marcos in San Diego County. San Diego has the distinction of having more Indian reservations than any other county in the United States, and our campus has one of the highest populations of American Indians in the state. Our AIS major is quite robust in terms of course offerings, and one of the concentrations of the major is Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Climate Change. All our courses are offered for general education credit, which means that most of the students in our courses are not actually AIS majors. They come from a diverse array of majors, from business to biological and environmental sciences to criminal justice and many more.

Assessing student knowledge

I’ve learned that it’s very helpful to assess students’ knowledge of American Indians at the beginning of any class I teach. It’s become predictable but not surprising to find out the vast majority of them know next to nothing. Why? Because their public school education is sorely lacking in this regard. Research has shown that in the educational standards of all fifty states American Indians are overwhelmingly depicted in a pre-1900 existence, as people of the past with no presence in modern America. In other words, they are represented as extinct. In actuality there are 574 tribal nations that are federally recognized and have government-to-government relationships with the United States, and currently steward approximately 56 million acres of land under tribal jurisdiction. And as other research has clearly shown, on a global scale Indigenous people are among the most disproportionately impacted by climate change.

Knowing all this, it seemed sensible to assess my students’ knowledge about climate change as well. I am currently on the steering committee of a project creating curriculum for climate change and environmental justice literacy at all levels of elementary and secondary education for the state. I am well aware that students receive little to no education on climate change, so I presumed they would know very little about it in my classroom. My suspicions turned out to be correct, which gave me valuable information to make decisions about how to proceed from the outset.

In today’s increasingly polarized world, few topics are more politicized than climate change. Despite decades of solid international science confirming the planet is warming due to human activity (“anthropogenic” climate change), we have seen how the public can easily be misled to reject science and instead believe cockamamie conspiracy theories about almost anything. The purpose, of course, is to deflect attention away from industries and processes that are most responsible for causing climate change. Virtually all this information manipulation occurs in our media spaces, with media broadly defined here as news, entertainment, and social media ecosystems.

As evidence shows, younger generations raised entrenched in the digital world of cell phones and computers fall prey to propaganda and psychological manipulation in numerous ways, including distorted perceptions of reality. The combination of a lack of education about climate change and reality distortion were dynamics that became obvious in my classroom assessment.

Teaching media literacy

As everyone knows, there is no avoiding online technology and as college professors it is our responsibility to learn to use it as an effective teaching tool, as well as to guide students in its wise use in their own personal use when appropriate. I also like to teach with the visual medium of film given the proliferation of great material that is widely available on so many topics. I decided to use a diverse set of digital media to aid in my students’ skill-building as savvy consumers of media, and I set aside the first four weeks of the course dedicated strictly to the goal of media literacy learning with climate change as the focal point.

It’s also important to note, however, that in the US higher education has come under attack in recent years by conservative critics who believe colleges and universities are incubators for liberal ideological indoctrination. Because of many higher education institutions’ dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, sometimes DEI is derisively called “wokeism”. The term “woke” derives from social justice oriented projects that recognize oppression against certain marginalized groups as systemic; essentially, it describes progressive values. Ethnic studies (including American Indian studies) and environmental fields are direct targets of anti-wokeism rhetoric and legislation. Therefore, it was critical that my teaching methods not be centred on my personal political viewpoints, but instead be directed from and shaped by professional objectivity, while also accepting that climate science has long been settled on the concept of anthropogenic climate change.

I began by showing a set of films, the first one called Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) by Martin Durkin. Durkin is widely known as a climate denier, and this was not his first climate denial film, just his most recent. The film uses cheeky British humour combined with slick graphics and interviews with a recycled cast of climate denying academics to mock and denigrate climate scientists, activists, educators, and politicians working to combat anthropogenic climate change. To the untrained eye the film seems convincing; I asked students to write a reflection, discussing whether or not they were convinced of the film’s claims that climate change is a hoax. It was disturbing to me how many of them found the film convincing.

Next, they viewed two episodes of a four-part documentary called The Power of Big Oil, a PBS series chronicling the history of the fossil fuel industry’s knowledge that carbon from burning fossil fuels was causing the planet to warm, and their subsequent decades-long disinformation campaign to conceal the knowledge and mislead the public. The series features former industry insiders, climate scientists, and a plethora of damning documentation with the unvarnished, hard-hitting credibility PBS is known for. Again, the students were asked to write a reflection and assess for believability and compare it to the Durkin film. I could see some of their minds beginning to change or at least to question the veracity of the previous film.

Finally, they were asked to view a YouTube video made by Peter Hatfield, a science journalist who exposes “junk science” in media. Hatfield systematically deconstructed the Durkin film to reveal the manipulation of data and other dishonest tactics that contributed to the film’s supposed credibility.

For reading assignments my students read an article on how to detect media bias from the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) website. I have appreciated FAIR’s work for decades and the article provided clear, honest appraisal of what constitutes media bias. FAIR pointed out things like the way stories are told, from what perspective, and how images can be skewed to sway opinion. Students also became familiar with the Ad Fontes Interactive Media Bias chart, a valuable tool they would use in future assignments for understanding how various news sources tend to lean in their perspectives.

For one class session I brought in as a guest lecturer a trusted colleague from the communications department of our university who teaches media literacy. She delivered a well-honed lesson that focused on two social aspects of media: the public sphere perspective and the market sphere perspective. The public sphere perspective understands media as existing in the realm of the public trust, which should be subjected to some kinds of regulation to guard against corporate mis- and disinformation. The market sphere perspective, on the other hand, values the expansion of choice which in theory results in lower cost and better quality sources. In reality, however, it has resulted in the consolidation of corporate control over media in which just a handful of conglomerates (which she referred to as oligopolies) control mass media in the US.

Other assignments included a media analysis comparing the previously mentioned three films. They analysed each for things like emotionally driven content, credibility of the filmmakers, quality of sources, citations, and visuals, and funding sources. They also had a news journaling exercise throughout the semester where they looked for and summarized news sources on climate change and assessed them for bias utilizing the tools they had been given. I don’t normally love grading, but I really looked forward to reading their news journals and learned a lot from them.

One of the most valuable aspects of the course this semester was its coinciding with the highly contentious and consequential Harris/Trump presidential election. For one of their news journals, I had students find news stories comparing the proposed climate policies of both candidates. This was an excellent way for them to find out for themselves the differences between the two main political parties in the bipolar American system relative to climate change. This approach meant that I didn’t have to put myself in the precarious position of advancing one political view over another in a way that could be construed as “indoctrination”. They can now see for themselves what the future means for climate change policy with the Trump-led Republican party at the helm. And it’s not pretty.

Final reflections

At the end of the course, several students remarked about how eye-opening the class was for them. Overall, I was impressed by their written assignments which showed me that they were really alert to media bias. At the same time, they seemed convinced about climate change being human caused.

As a result of this most recent election, for those of us who care about the environment and accept climate science, we are in for a rough ride as we were in the first Trump administration. My students were too young to have been aware of the seismic changes that the first Trump administration ushered in, and they have grown up in an era of political hyper-polarization. This hyper-polarization is in large part the result of systematized psychological and perceptual manipulation designed to obscure what we understand as truth. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 showed us how digital social media derived data has been used against global citizens in new ways, distorting our ability to discern fact from fiction. In a world of “alternative facts”, truth becomes a matter of whose opinions get the most attention in our news and information ecosystems, regardless of hard, evidence-based facts.

For this generation of young people critical thinking is more important than ever, and it is incumbent upon our education systems to foster those skills. Media literacy training is one of the most valuable and useful ways we as teachers can build those abilities. Without skilful thinkers, democracy is endangered, and so is human habitability on this planet.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and an independent educator and advisor in American Indian environmental policy and community engagement.Her scholarship and community engaged work focuses on environmental justice and traditional knowledge in the context of tribal sovereignty and nationalism, as well as critical sports studies in the realm of surf culture and professional surfing. She also brings these ideas into her work as an award-winning journalist, having written for many high profile publications including the Los Angeles Times, Sierra Magazine, Indian Country Today Media Network,Time.com, High Country News, and many others. Dina’s most recent book is Beacon Press’s As Long As Grass Grows: Indigenous Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. She is currently under contract with Beacon Press for two new books: Who Gets to be Indian: Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American ‘Identity is scheduled for release in spring 2025. She is also a co-editor of a new collection from Cambridge University Press’s Elements Series on Indigenous Environmental Research.