FALL/WINTER 2021
Toward Media Fluency If the last year taught us anything, it is the importance of media literacy to society. Educators have known this for a while, according to history teacher and Director of Professional Development and Evaluation Meredith Baldi ’01. “There has been a national and international push for it as part of any education. It’s the #1 competency that schools should teach and adults should model.” As the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) puts it, the goal is for students to “develop the habits of inquiry and skills of expression that they need to be critical thinkers, effective communicators, and active citizens in today’s world.” Sounds very George School. Hardly surprising, then, that when Meredith and film teacher Scott Seraydarian ’90 developed a media literacy course, they designed a creative, cross-disciplinary, and distinctly George School one. The course, called Producing Peace: Civic Media Literacy & Production, launched in fall 2020, but it was several years in the making. While Meredith was exploring the historical impact of media in her classes, Scott (working as a filmmaker) was wrestling with the power that digital technology gives to media makers. He
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was struck by how easily meaning can be manipulated with simple devices—like music—and he started delving into media literacy issues. In 2017 he joined the faculty and, soon after, the school’s FOCUS Committee, which included teachers, including Meredith, working to heighten learning through interdisciplinary collaboration. Scott and Meredith decided to develop— and co-teach—a media literacy course. To workshop their plans (as part of NAMLE’s 2019 Media Literacy Week), they had their IB film and IB global politics classes collaborate on four films with media literacy themes, including one about a fake news story deliberately spread around campus. When the films were screened and the story debunked in assembly, reactions varied, but a dialogue was sparked. “It forced our students to understand and apply key questions in media literacy as both consumers and producers of media,” they explained in “A Real Take on Fake News,” an article they co-wrote for the National Association of Independent School’s Independent Teacher magazine. This fall, despite the COVID-altered program, Producing Peace began, with several quintessentially George School features.
