By Co-Publisher Kaitlyn Clark
The first week of March is Newspaper in Education Week, which calls on teachers to incorporate newspapers into their lesson plans. When youth read newspapers, it encourages them to think critically about current events – locally, provincially, nationally, and across the world. Even better, that critical thinking can spark action and mold the students into engaged citizens.
All teachers are required to work within a set curriculum and impart foundational knowledge for a set of subjects, from mathematics to history to psychology – but that foundation shouldn’t be the end of a student’s learning in school.
When the Province was changing the health and sexual education curriculum, a then-retired teacher from my elementary school – JL Mitchener – said she believed they should only be teaching “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Now, this may have been a bit of a hyperbolization on her part to make a point – considering that it suggests they should not teach history even – but regardless, I wholeheartedly disagreed with her.
I was never in one of this teacher’s classes, but she often patrolled the schoolyard during recess. I told her that even during our limited interactions, she routinely showed me the importance of using your manners and speaking well (she was a stickler for students saying “may I use the bathroom, please” instead of our go-to “can I use the bathroom”), and of showing kindness to those around us (she was always easy to chat with, and was always particularly concerned with the long-term implications of me cracking my knuckles). It is a testament to the profession, and an example of my point, that I still remember my interactions with this woman to this day.
Fast forward to my time at Cayuga Secondary. The curriculum included a single semester split between careers and civics. Interestingly, these classes proved to become my greatest example of how a teacher can make or break a class. My careers teacher was, to put it simply, a bit of a mess. He started our class on how to choose your career by explaining how much he hated his own – because he hated children, he had just wanted the summers off. In a backwards sort of way, it was a great lesson about finding something you loved, because otherwise you’d probably resent it and do a terrible job. It was not surprising when I heard some time after graduating that that particular teacher was no longer with the school.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dewar – who taught civics at the time – was a great teacher. He had a great way of keeping things interesting and engaging. He also specifically expected students to get involved.
The big project for his civics class was simple: make a scrap book of newspaper articles. He provided a list of topics we had to find and include in our scrapbook, such as a local event, a national issue, something political, and so on. Beyond reading Sunday morning cartoons from my dad’s newspaper, this was the first time I really cared about the news. Mr. Dewar provided stacks of old papers for us to comb through for our stories and cut out, and I found myself reading a number of them just out of curiosity. It opened my eyes to a lot of things that were going on around me that I had never noticed before. I don’t remember if the assignment required us to write something up about what we learned – I feel like it did – but I do remember that sense of wanting to know more and wanting to do more.
This kind of experience shouldn’t be limited to a couple of weeks in one grade. Newspapers cover all types of topics that intersect with the foundational curriculum of all grades. For those who do move forward with using news sources in the classroom, we suggest having your students ask three questions for every article they read.
- Who’s telling the story?
- Who benefits from the story?
- Who’s missing from the story, if anyone?
These questions can help students think critically about the news they’re ingesting, whether it’s from The Haldimand Press, a national news organization, a tabloid, or social media. These questions can even be expanded to other forms of media, including video games, movies, and advertisements. The Press does its absolute best to ensure fair and accurate reporting, but no matter how trusted the source, all youth – and adults – should always think critically of the media they consume.
Newspapers are an amazing tool, and we hope teachers will use them more often. To that end, we are offering every local classroom a free newspaper subscription to use in their ongoing education.
If you are a teacher, email us at info@haldimandpress.com with the details of your classroom/school and your mailing address to start your free subscription. We’d love to hear from you in the future about how you’ve used the paper in your classroom, and students would be welcome to submit letters to the editors on topics that interest them.
