Journalism education as a site for civic reasoning

Abstract

Journalism education can prompt young people to ask critical questions about their school and civic environments. The National Academy of Education (NAEd) recently released a report called Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse, in which they issue a call for educators to teach civic reasoning skills. This qualitative research study investigates an original multimedia journalism curriculum in a Grade 10 New Media course in British Columbia, Canada and explores students’ participation in civic reasoning practices. This curriculum was implemented three times between 2021 and 2022. Thirty-one students between 15 and 19 years old participated in the study. Three elements of civic reasoning are analyzed within students’ journalism stories: revising assumptions, moral resistance, and identifying the collective “we.” Participants’ journalism stories illuminate opportunities and tensions for civic reasoning pedagogy, including how to entertain multiple perspectives while still enacting moral resistance to harmful narratives.

Introduction

Journalism education can prompt young people to ask critical questions about their schools and civic environments. The National Academy of Education (NAEd) recently released a report called Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse (Lee et al., 2021a), in which they issue a call for educators to teach civic reasoning skills. The current research study investigates an original multimedia journalism curriculum in a Grade 10 New Media course and explores students’ participation in civic reasoning practices. Reasoning within the NAEd framework, is defined as a social activity that entails the ability to communicate and listen across differences, evaluate information, embrace conceptual change, and ask big picture questions like: “What should we do?.” The authors reference trends that are fundamentally changing “the psychology of citizens” (Stitzlein, 2021), such as isolating ourselves in digital echo chambers. Civic reasoning is a framework for education that aims to foster students’ abilities and willingness to engage with multiple points of view and develop agency in complex environments. This study examines how journalism education might contribute to this effort.

The NAEd civic reasoning framework explicitly advocates for communicating across difference and embracing multiple viewpoints. However, the authors of the report mention scholars who note the limitations of including multiple viewpoints when carried to extremes. “They argue that there are certainly some viewpoints that are hostile to the deliberative process itself or that aim to exclude certain others from full citizenship or personhood, and that good civic reasoning requires drawing a line that excludes such positions from even entering into or harming our civic interactions” (Lee et al., 2021b, p. 35). Tension around what perspectives to include / exclude is at the heart of the current study, as student journalists wrestled with how to create tension in their stories and present accurate portrayals of their issue. How do young journalists figure out where to “draw the line” between ideas that are worth incorporating into their own reasoning, and those that are harmful? As journalism educators, how do we frame big ideas like objectivity or multi-perspectival stories in ways that validate students’ intersectional identities and lived experiences?

The field of journalism and journalism education has embraced debates over the meaning and value of ideological principles like objectivity (Deuze, 2005). Aujla-Sidhu (2022) used critical race theory to analyze journalism education curricula. They argue for decolonizing journalism education practices by actively centering the lived experiences of racialized individuals and non-Western perspectives and encouraging advocate, radical and constructive models of journalism. They cite Callison and Young (2019) who argue that upholding objectivity as a standard can be an excuse for journalists to avoid topics of social justice and inequity. Journalists are positioned to shape the stories and narratives that inform our civic reasoning—and journalists themselves engage in civic reasoning as they wrestle with professional values, considering which perspectives to include and how to construct a relevant, accurate story.

This current study proposes that secondary school journalism education can be a fruitful site for stimulating elements of civic reasoning and joining larger conversations about how journalistic narratives are constructed and by/for whom. This study contributes to current discourses around decolonizing journalism education by centering the stories and reflections of young storytellers in high school settings and highlighting curricular choices that both helped and hindered the production of counter-narratives.

This study was a design-based partnership between a university researcher and a New Media/English Language Arts educator in Vancouver, British Columbia. In the current analysis we explore the following questions: How do journalistic storytelling principles, such as multiple perspectives, research, tension, and relevance, present opportunities for students to engage in civic reasoning? What complex reasoning emerges during student journalism processes, and how can this reasoning inform civic reasoning pedagogy? This paper provides qualitative examples from students’ journalism podcasts and online stories to shed light on these questions.

Theoretical framing

Critical digital pedagogy

Critical digital pedagogy (Mirra et al., 2018) was used as a guiding framework to design the focal journalism curriculum. Mirra et al. suggest that digital media education should strive to include four components: critical digital consumption, critical digital production, critical digital distribution and critical digital invention. Critical digital consumption urges young people to deconstruct the ways media encourages individuals to identify with specific racial, gendered, or other social groups (2018, p. 16). Critical digital production asks students to engage in the production of “radical counternarratives,” and use the affordances and limitations of various modes of production to communicate. Counter-narratives is a concept from critical race theory (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002) that refers to narratives of lived experiences and societal injustices that challenge dominant discourses, especially with regards to marginalized and racialized identities. Critical digital distribution asks young people to consider the audiences, power structures, and agendas behind distribution of media. Critical digital invention engages students in questions regarding who created the technology platforms with which media is produced and consumed? Which social groups are allowed to innovate and invent, and what biases are embedded within these technologies as a result? In outlining these components, Mirra et al. challenge educators to consider whether we are providing critical lenses through which our students can produce digital content, as well as move beyond the classroom walls to consider the ethical decisions involved in distributing our work and becoming digital makers and producers.

Critical digital pedagogy is rooted in the tradition of critical media literacy (Kellner and Share, 2007) which emerged as an educational approach to literacy education that embraced new media technologies as texts. Critical media literacy draws on the philosophy of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), which positions learners as active participants in constructing knowledge. Freire opposed the “banking” method of education which assumed learners were empty vessels, and argued that a praxis of inquiry, research, action, and reflection facilitated the development of a critical consciousness. A critical consciousness, according to Freire (1973), is the ability to perceive contradictions in one’s own environment and society that undermine one’s own humanity or the humanity of others, and then engage in collective action toward justice. These contradictions are recognitions of structural power imbalances, such as prejudice, discrimination, or oppression. Critical consciousness provides a link between pedagogy and reasoning. Freire theorized that turning the curricular gaze toward students’ own lives, introducing critical lenses, and learning through praxis would help facilitate a critical consciousness—an ability to perceive contradictions and reason about one’s own circumstances. This is the theory of change at the heart of this current study. We are interested in how a journalism curriculum, that was designed using the critical digital pedagogy framework, could inspire changes in students’ reasoning about issues affecting their own lives.

Previous research has illuminated ways in which new media education can facilitate critical consciousness with high school students (Ilten-Gee, 2020; Bruce and Lin, 2009; Curwood and Gibbons, 2009; Mahiri, 2011; Soep and Chávez, 2010). Researchers have demonstrated and documented creative new media pedagogy that allows young people to critique status quo representations embedded in popular culture and social media to build a critical consciousness (Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2008; Stack and Kelly, 2006). Podcast production, specifically, has been theorized as a pedagogical tool that can stimulate critical moral reasoning and draw awareness to contradictions in one’s own circumstances (Ilten-Gee, 2020).

In this current study, all students used some form of digital tools to produce their stories and their final story outcomes were either audio podcasts, online blog posts, or photo essays. This analysis focuses on the narrative decision-making that students employed while producing these stories. While critical digital pedagogy framed the curriculum design, this analysis focuses on the reasoning that emerged from students’ engagement with the journalism process, and not specifically the digital affordances of students’ story formats.

Civic reasoning

Our conception of reasoning comes from the National Academy of Education’s recent report on civic reasoning and discourse. In Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse (Lee et al., 2021a), the authors advocate for education that prepares students to collectively and critically solve problems related to systemic inequities, digital dilemmas, and global relationships. In Chapter 2 of this report, Lee et al. (2021b) defined civic reasoning as the process of thinking through what “we” (collective social group) should do in a given situation, taking into account historical, emotional, and analytical dimensions. They wrote, “The goal is to socialize people, especially young people, to wrestle with complexity, to consider multiple points of view, to interrogate their own assumptions, to empathize with others, and ultimately to aim their lives toward doing good in the world, including good for themselves but also good for others” (Lee et al., 2021b, p. 97). These goals are in line with Freire’s conception of recognizing contradictions and developing a critical consciousness. The NAEd report has aggregated multiple theoretical approaches to reasoning, including conceptual change and sociomoral reasoning, and suggested learning principles that can guide instruction and curriculum. The civic reasoning report provides ideas for how to identify changes in reasoning, and what kind of reasoning might contribute to civic goals. In this analysis, we have attended to three of these reasoning components: students’ abilities to revise assumptions, moral resistance within identity development, and conceptualizing oneself as part of a collective “we.”

Revising assumptions

Embracing the transformation of one’s own ideas and revising one’s own assumptions (conceptual change) are among the list of learning principles that can foster civic reasoning (Lee et al., 2021b). By adopting a historical lens and learning to employ evidence-informed decision making, our assumptions and beliefs about the world may change. Additionally, an awareness of our own social identities in relation to historical and political discourses may facilitate an updating of one’s beliefs and perspectives. Lee et al. draw on DiSessa’s work (2002) to explain how our prior knowledge and “intuitive understandings” can conflict with new facts and information. Learning environments must confront these conflicts to foster conceptual change (Lee et al., 2021b, p. 63).

Moral resistance

Civic reasoning encourages strategic identity development in which young people learn the necessary social emotional skills and critical understandings to recognize when one’s humanity is under attack (moral resistance; Lee et al., 2021b; Rogers and Way, 2018). Lee et al. (2021b) describe moral resistance as a key component of identity development for students from marginalized backgrounds. Moral resistance places value on lived experiences with systemic injustices. Lee et al. write: “Moral resistance is the process of rejecting ideologies and norms that are harmful to the self and that undermine our core needs and capacities of human connection (vulnerability, curiosity, emotionality, empathy, morality, social connection)” (2021b, p. 69). This idea comes from research by Rogers and Way (2018) who show that resistance to racist norms is a healthy part of social emotional development for African American boys.

Identifying the collective “we”: adolescents

Civic reasoning is important for a society that intends to collectively make decisions for the greater good. According to the authors of this report, civic reasoning entails the ability to, “collectively decide on a just and mutually beneficial course of coordinated action, and to acknowledge and correct previously enacted community harm. . .” (Lee et al., 2021b, p. 55). In this study, students’ journalistic investigations helped them explore the different social groups they belong to—especially their age group—and question how they could participate in collective decision-making.

Journalism education

Smirnov and colleagues argued that journalism is a discipline that can support the development of cognitive competencies related to civic literacy, such as questioning sources and considering one’s own biases (Smirnov et al., 2018). A study conducted on the PBS News Hour Student Reporting Lab journalism education program reported significant quantitative benefits to students’ academic outcomes in the United States (Hobbs, 2016). Soep and Chávez (2010) ethnographically documented the journalism and media-making processes of young people between the ages of 14–24 at a non-profit organization in Oakland, CA called Youth Radio (now called YR Media). This organization placed young people alongside professional journalists and radio producers and facilitated co-production of stories told by young people for national outlets and audiences. In a process they termed collegial pedagogy, Soep and Chávez described the complicated decision-making that went on behind the scenes as young writers and storytellers deliberated with editors and mentors over how to frame their stories for national audiences.

Duncan-Andrade and Morrell wrote about implementing a critical pedagogy praxis with a high school English class in which students produced a magazine that explored daily injustices and issues through interviews, as well as first-person student narratives (2008, p. 66). This research suggests that journalism is a process and discipline that requires complex reasoning about story, modality, voice, and framing, in addition to serving as an outlet to examine and investigate injustices and power imbalances in students’ lives. Journalism education may, therefore, provide a site where civic reasoning can be cultivated and explored.

Aujla-Sidhu (2022) has critiqued journalism education for being disproportionately Eurocentric and western in the values, formats, and perspectives that are represented in curricula. They argue that issues of race and racism are often ignored or excluded from journalism education curricula—and yet, embracing topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion in journalism curricula has the potential to offer would-be journalists opportunities to practice critiquing power dynamics and structures of governance. These larger political discourses about journalism pedagogy are helpful in contextualizing the strengths and limitations of this current study.

Context for current study

In 2020, we (Authors 1 and 2) initiated an informal working group of New Media teachers in British Columbia, Canada that intended to explore how the critical digital literacy framework (Mirra et al., 2018) could inform New Media pedagogy in local classrooms. The group met regularly to share experiences, lesson ideas, and think through emerging media topics. With the introduction of a competency-based curriculum in 2016 in British Columbia, the province expanded its options for required English Language Arts courses in Grades 10 and 11, including New Media (B. C. Ministry of Education, 2018). Together, we collaborated on designing and implementing a journalism curriculum that met New Media standards and attempted to apply ideas from critical digital pedagogy. This journalism curriculum is explained further in the following section.

Procedures and methods

This study utilized design-based research to bring together experienced educators and university researchers to co-construct imaginative classroom learning experiences. The goal of educational design-based research is to develop and improve practical solutions to specific challenges as well as generate and contribute to theory (Wang and Hannafin, 2005). This method was chosen to elevate perspectives of both the teacher and researcher and allow for flexibility and adaptation to relevant classroom circumstances. As mentioned above, this research study emerged out of an informal working group which included New Media secondary school educators in British Columbia and Author 1, an university researcher. From within this group, three educators including Author 2, decided to engage in deeper research collaborations with Author 1, to design and implement a unit or project in their classroom that used critical digital pedagogy as an inspirational framework. This analysis focuses on the process and outcomes of the collaboration in Author 2′s classroom.

The goal of the unit in Author 2′s classroom was to create a multimedia journalism curriculum that foregrounded critical thinking and allowed students to choose a storytelling format and medium. This curriculum was created and piloted in the Spring of 2021 (online due to Covid-19), and then revised and implemented with one Grade 10 class in Fall of 2021, and one Grade 10 and one Grade 12 class in Spring of 2022. In total, 31 students between 15 and 19 years old participated in the study. Participants in this study were not asked to systematically self-identify their race, gender, or other demographic characteristics. This is a limitation of the study’s methodology. For context, British Columbia passed legislation in 2022 allowing public institutions to collect race-based data with the first data released in 2023 (British Columbia, 2022). As a result, disaggregated racial demographic data did not exist for school sites, except for Indigenous students. Since the study was embedded within a curricular unit in an existing classroom community, we did not want to add privacy disclosures for participants, since guardians had never been asked to release this information. We recognize that failing to collect this data systematically prevented us from being reliably attuned to intersectional trends and themes, and makes it difficult to replicate the study. Nine students voluntarily used self-identifying terms in their final stories and interviews, which included female, feminist, Chinese, thin, first-generation, athlete, gamer.

Author 1 has experience reporting on education issues, as well as teaching and co-producing radio and online journalism with young people. Author 2 is an experienced literacy educator, filmmaker, and photojournalist. The resulting journalism curriculum spanned approximately 8 weeks, from story ideas to finished products.

Curriculum and data collection

The journalism curriculum exposed students to a range of journalism formats (social media, photo-journalism, etc.), invited conversation about how journalists can reinforce or challenge stereotypical narratives about communities, and explored the role of personal connection in journalistic storytelling. While these aims align with efforts to decolonize journalism education curricula (Aujla-Sidhu, 2022), we did not insist on any particular lens or framing to prioritize student agency and choice. The unit began by exploring what journalism is and what purpose journalism can serve in our society. Students were exposed to several youth-produced journalism stories (sourced mainly from YR Media). These resources intentionally incorporate a philosophy of critical pedagogy, lifting up young racialized and marginalized voices, and counter-narratives of racialized communities (Lee and Soep, 2022; Lee and Soep, 2018; Soep and Chávez, 2010). These examples included a story about racist Halloween costumes, protesting racial injustice as a cheerleader, and the model minority myth. Students identified components of a good story, including tension, relevance, research, and a personal / human perspective. These components were used throughout the unit to provide constructive feedback. We discussed the responsibilities and privileges associated with being a journalist. Additionally, students engaged in hands-on interviewing practices and learned to craft interview questions that lead to expansive answers. In the production phase, students used their phones to record interviews and practiced audio-editing on web-based software. Authors 1 and 2 facilitated interviews between students and experts in the community (e.g. psychologists, police officers, game designers, researchers, journalists). For their final project, each student was asked to report and produce one journalism story in the form of a blog post, an audio podcast, a video, a photo-essay, or a conventional or braided essay. At the end of the unit, students were given a digital survey where they were asked to reflect on the process of interviewing, researching, and producing a story.

Authors 1 and 2 co-taught this curriculum. Author 1 also observed and took field notes, supported students with technological and story design-related questions, as well as interviewed students. In addition to making copies of students’ classwork and final journalism stories, students were interviewed at the beginning and end of the unit. Students were asked in these interviews and in the final survey to reflect on any shifts in their own thinking and surprising or challenging moments they encountered throughout the journalism process. Interviews attempted to solicit and co-construct interpretations of students’ experiences.

Foregrounding critical storytelling

Previous research with youth media production has shown that young people often end up reproducing dominant discourses and stereotypes. Kelly and Currie (2021) studied gender stereotype analysis in critical media literacy education with high school students. They wrote that even when students were able to identify stereotypes, their own media products did not necessarily counter these stereotypes. Journalists can also perpetuate stereotypes in their reporting, especially in their coverage of racialized young people (Dixon and Azocar, 2006; Jackson, 2016). Soep and Chávez also wrote about how youth journalists’ attempts to publish counter-narratives can be compromised by mainstream news outlets who pigeon-hole youth into certain types of stories and messages (2010, p. 76).

This research inspired Authors 1 and 2 to introduce stereotypes and counter-narratives (and how they can be perpetuated in the journalism context) in the initial journalism lessons, to guide students away from reproducing problematic discourses. As mentioned earlier, counter-narratives are a concept theorized by Solórzano and Yosso (2002) as part of critical race methodology. Counter-narratives refer to personal or composite stories that reject majoritarian narratives about racialized people and communities, and instead surface the nuanced, intersectional ways that race and racism affect peoples’ lives and their interactions with social systems. We discussed how journalists can complicate the portrayal of people, places, and events by foregrounding intersectional identities or marginalized voices. With students, we used the catchphrase: “Stereotypes simplify, and counter-narratives complicate.” Students practiced identifying stereotypes about their own generation within journalism stories. Counter-narratives are specifically mentioned as essential to critical digital production (Mirra et al., 2018). As much as we intentionally foregrounded this concept, we ultimately wanted students to produce stories that inspired changes in their thinking.

Analytical process

To analyze the data, we adopted a method outlined by Ravitch and Carl (2021) called immersive engagement, and more specifically dialogic engagement. The first phase entailed Author 1, Author 2, and a research assistant conducting unstructured readings of the data (classwork, interview transcripts, final journalism stories). We had conversations about first impressions of students’ stories and their responses to survey questions. We engaged in a process of collaboratively annotating participants’ transcripts using the Comments feature in MS Word, leaving notes about particular phrases or moments that struck us as exciting or interesting. This annotation process was similar to the process of open-coding or first-level coding (Miles et al., 2014). For example, we noted when students chose topics related to social injustices, like racism or sexism. We commented on how students’ final interviews illustrated more nuanced thinking than their initial interviews. We were surprised by students’ reflections on personal growth.

In our second round of coding, we used a more targeted lens to look for critical digital themes and elements of civic reasoning, while sharing open-ended insights as they emerged. We did this work collaboratively, as each Author brought a different lens of expertise. After each coding session, Author 1 drafted a formative data analysis memo (Ravitch and Carl, 2021, p. 263) which summarized emerging themes. A high level coding distinction was made between codes related to pedagogical insights versus student reasoning insights. Pedagogical insights were moments in the data where student comments made us reflect on pedagogical theories or strategies. Specific pedagogical subthemes included assessment implications, links to linguistic and cultural practices, and impact beyond classroom walls. Student reasoning insights related to observations about students’ logic, rationales, conclusions, and judgments that appeared in students’ interviews and stories, some of which connect to existing theories of reasoning. More specific subthemes included: revision of assumptions, counter-narratives, seeking new perspectives, reconciling competing perspectives, and moral resistance.

We looked for similarities across transcripts and across stories, but also considered an individual’s story over time. For example, we isolated and drew links between moments where different students recognized transformations in their own biases or assumptions, but we also followed each student reporter from their first to second interview, to their final story, looking for narrative shifts in the way they constructed their stories. Maxwell (2013) calls this type of analytical work connecting strategies. In this analysis, we will focus on findings related to participants’ reasoning and meaning-making within their journalism stories.

Findings

This analysis details findings related to young peoples’ civic reasoning, including how they revised assumptions, enacted moral resistance, and identified the collective “we.” All participants’ names are self-selected pseudonyms.

Revising prior assumptions through journalism processes

Several participants mentioned in post-project interviews that their investigations led to changes in their own thinking or disrupted their own assumptions. Lee et al. (2021b) draw on DiSessa’s (2002) research about how people build on prior knowledge to construct new knowledge. Lee and colleagues argued that embracing conceptual change is essential to fostering civic reasoning, but that often our prior knowledge conflicts with new learning targets. They argue that we must attend to students’ intuitive understandings, as well as “whether what we think we know is contestable or whether it is definitive” (p. 63). The investigative processes of journalism can disrupt our intuitive understandings and provide exposure to opposing and contrasting viewpoints. It can also unearth tensions as new information forces us to confront our own implicit biases (Lee et al., 2021b). Through research and interviews, students located tensions between their intuitive understandings and new perspectives.

Mango reported a story about athletes and mental health. As a student basketball player, she was under significant pressure during the season to juggle practice, studying, family, and sleep. She noticed this pressure taking a toll on the mental health of her teammates. She interviewed a Ph.D. candidate who studied psychology and sports. Mango said in a post-study interview:

My previous assumption was basically kind of like being a part of sports can directly impact your mental well-being. . . But after talking with [expert], she said to be careful about using the word like causation . . . she said that you necessarily don’t really know if basketball is . . . a direct cause of their mental health. It can be many different underlying factors. (Interview, Mango, June 27, 2022)

Mango had crafted an explanation for herself about a phenomenon she witnessed in her own life, and journalism allowed her to complicate that explanation and draw more careful conclusions. Lee et al. (2021b) point out the complexity involved in characterizing causal relationships as part of civic reasoning: “Reasons relate to one another in all sorts of complex ways, and we can think of the skills of rationality as also including understanding how to think well about the relation of various reasons to one another” (p. 32). Mango was inspired to think carefully about the relationship between different reasons. The conclusion of her journalism story changed to accommodate this new consideration.

Max reported a story on her generation’s relationship to phones and technology, and realized that she was implicated in the problems she was attempting to critique. Before reporting the story, she said she felt like an outlier in her desire for offline, face-to-face interactions with her peers. In an interview she said: “I thought I was 100% on the: ‘Oh, I’m so like in the present. I don’t use my phone when I’m around people.’ No, I do, and I just had to . . . do this project to realize that I’m like the people I’m around, but I’m just more aware of it” (Interview, Max, May 10, 2022).

Engaging in journalism resulted in a re-positioning of the self in relation to civic and personal issues. Journalism education can surface these tensions in a direct way by introducing practices like questioning, researching, and fact-checking. The scripting and editing process of organizing diverse perspectives into an argument facilitates systematic revision of prior assumptions, as journalists may feel accountable to the interviewees who trusted them with their stories and perspectives (Ilten-Gee, 2020). Providing students with opportunities to interact with experts, and then reflect on how their own thinking has changed emphasizes meta-awareness skills and supports the development of civic reasoners.

Identity and moral resistance in journalism

As mentioned earlier, Lee et al. (2021b) describe moral resistance as critical to the healthy psychosocial and identity development for students from marginalized backgrounds. In this study, we noticed this capacity emerge as students conducted research into topics related to discrimination. Emily chose to investigate the gender gap in STEM professions. In an interview, she said that she wanted to become a computer engineer like her mom. She wondered whether it was a stereotype that “women don’t like STEM as much as men,” or whether it was a fact.

Emily had experienced isolation in engineering summer camps as the only girl. Emily’s podcast began by reflecting on clips of Barbie commercials and Monster truck commercials. Emily’s narration asks: “If this strange gender-based toy divide was enough to send 9-year-old me into spirals, what about the gender divides in schools, workplaces, and even our own homes?” Emily engaged in critical digital consumption (Mirra et al., 2018) as she examined the commercial tropes that encouraged her to identify with a specific social group.

Emily included interviews with female scientists, including her mom, and information about famous historical female engineers. Emily also confronted problematic voices. She mentioned the infamous “Google Memo” in which a senior engineer argued women were less biologically-suited to STEM roles. Emily followed up by saying: “[James] Damore is correct about these biological differences between men and women. However, they do not affect either sex’s mathematical or scientific skills, meaning one sex is not naturally better at math than the other.” When asked about her rebuttal in a post-project interview, Emily said she found this information in a scientific journal. Solórzano and Yosso (2002) argued that challenging biological-deficit stories is a critical part of counter-storytelling. Emily took up questions at the heart of critical digital production and invention, as she explored what roles society “allows” her to play.

In a post-project reflection, Emily mentioned that she had discovered a scientific study that countered her gender socialization argument. This article purported to show that female monkeys prefer plush toys and male monkeys prefer trucks. Emily told us that the article concluded that toy preferences were not solely based on socialization, but innate sex differences. However, Emily did not include this finding in her podcast. In an interview, Emily said: “I just feel like it didn’t really blend well with the other information and it might have gone against what I was trying to prove a little bit, cause it was like more of a biological difference than a cultural [difference]” (Interview, Emily, May 6, 2022). In this moment, Emily made a choice about what narrative she wanted to tell—something that all journalists do, but she did so without a robust justification for making this choice. This comment was a learning moment for us as journalism educators. Journalists cannot simply choose to omit information that makes a story less clean and straightforward. However, the stakes for including this information were too high for Emily’s identity as an aspiring female computer engineer.

In the context of moral resistance, Emily’s response to this scientific article was healthy and necessary, as it put forward an ideology that was harmful to her sense of self. If we had known that Emily was wrestling with this information, we could have helped her articulate reasons for rejecting it beyond narrative consistency, including how to assess its validity, how to interpret the epistemological assumptions in the article, and where to look for rebuttals. However, we may have also suggested alternative ways of including the article in her final podcast. For example, she could have included both the monkey findings as well as critiques of this research, or reached out to scientists for interviews about the merits/pitfalls of this type of research. The monkey article is the type of “objective science” that requires critical digital consumption, as it effaces social, historical, and cultural forces from our interpretation of inequity. In the future, we hope to better prepare students to encounter such information, and instead of ignoring it, shape an informed critique.

Identifying the collective “we:” adolescent autonomy and agency

The final theme that emerged from students’ reporting was a clear tension around autonomy and agency with regards to their own age group. Some students arrived at the conclusion that teenagers were not to be trusted. Dodo’s investigation into teen drinking led her to the conclusion that access to alcohol for young people is far too easy. She interviewed an expert that she identified as someone who worked with young people and substance abuse. Dodo described how alcohol can affect mental health, memory, and reaction time, but acknowledged that some young people might use alcohol for coping with trauma or because of peer pressure. She interviewed friends about how they get access to alcohol: through aunts and uncles, lenient parents, or friends who are of legal drinking age. Dodo said to her audience: “Should we raise the legal age of drinking? There are opposing views on this issue- some say yes and some say no. However, more importantly, we should focus on national alcohol advertising and comprehensive community-based programs. We need to change the way young people think about alcohol.” We can see Dodo consider giving young people less autonomy, in an effort to protect young people and prevent underage drinking from becoming normalized.

In contrast, Frankie explored the issue of lowering the voting age to 16. Frankie emailed her local MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly), and this public official agreed to an interview. In the phone interview, the MLA was extremely supportive and told Frankie of a bill in progress to change the voting age to 16. The MLA said: “Young adults can drive at 16. They can operate a vehicle. Surely they should be able to actually vote and engage in the democratic process in that way. So for us it is really important that the voices of young people are heard and are included in this process.” Frankie introduced reasons why people might not support this initiative. She cited data from Austria, where the voting age is 16, that shows that very few younger voters turn out at the polls. Frankie argued that people are actually concerned about the competence of young people: “The worry. . .is not that 16 and 17 year-olds would not use their vote, but that too many of them would vote and do so incompetently in a way that would be detrimental to our democracy.” However, the MLA interviewee said that many young people are extremely politically involved, and that registering to vote before leaving high school could increase the chances that they stay engaged. Frankie concluded that the voting restrictions have to do with a lack of trust in teenagers.

In terms of civic reasoning, these journalism stories demonstrate that young people recognized when they were invited into civic conversations and when they were excluded. They identified stereotypes about their own age group and even developmental research about their impulsive behavior. These storytellers identified debates in which their own responsibility and competence as civic actors was central. These tensions also reflect age-related trends for high school students who are developing a stronger sense of themselves as members of social systems and constructing personal identities around their own unique thoughts and ideas (Nucci & Ilten-Gee, 2021). Journalism presented an opportunity for young people to explore their role in society and be critical of the way youth are positioned in this society.

Discussion

A close analysis of multimedia youth journalism processes and outcomes revealed that journalism education can facilitate civic reasoning in ways that contribute to a future generation of collective problem-solvers. The journalism process allowed participants to revise their assumptions in specific contexts and produce subsequently complicated narratives. Students mentioned that their perceptions of their own behavior had changed after interviewing experts and peers. The journalism process helped to disrupt old explanations and patterned ways of thinking.

Participants wrestled with sexist narratives embedded in existing media and current events. As journalism educators, we are interested in how we can prepare students to encounter information or perspectives that undermine their own intersectional identities. How can we equip them with critical frameworks to interrogate and position these perspectives inside larger discourses of inequity, racism, sexism, etc., and determine their strategy for constructing a journalism story? What does moral resistance look like in journalism, especially in the context of a class of over 30 students, each working independently on different stories?.

The outcomes just mentioned, revision and resistance, are at odds with each other. We are simultaneously asking young people to disrupt their assumptions and embrace new information, while resisting harmful narratives. To us, this represents the inherent complexity, challenge, and opportunity of civic reasoning. We need young people who can nimbly reason through new dilemmas and emerging perspectives, as well as identify and reject narratives rooted in oppression, prejudice, or inequity. For students from marginalized backgrounds, how can we help them articulate why embracing new information makes sense in certain contexts, whereas in others, resisting new information might be healthy?

Finally, youth journalists wrestled with their own role as adolescents in the civic realm. They demonstrated that they are keenly aware of how others perceive their strengths and weaknesses, and they questioned how much autonomy they should be granted. The ironic tension that emerged from these stories is that the youth reporters presented well-reasoned, researched, and thoughtful arguments, while confronting research about their biological shortcomings and popular narratives about their own untrustworthiness.

Accuracy motivation in journalism education

In reflecting on the various choices that these journalists made about what information to include in their podcasts and online articles, it is interesting to consider two types of motivation theorized by Kunda (1990): directional motivation and accuracy motivation (Druckman, 2012; Kunda, 1990). Directional motivation is when people process new information with a bias toward their previous beliefs. “By contrast, when motivated by accuracy goals, ‘[Individuals] expend more cognitive effort on issue-related reasoning, attend to relevant information more carefully, and process it more deeply, often using more complex rules’’ (Kunda, 1990, p. 481)” (Kahne and Bowyer, 2017). Kahne and Bowyer (2017) elaborated on the difference between directional motivation and accuracy motivation in the context of media literacy education for youth. They found that young people with media literacy exposure were more likely to draw on accuracy motivation in evaluating online misinformation in the context of partisan issues, than young people without media literacy exposure.

Journalists attempt to present narratives that are fact-checked and represent multiple points of view. In the current study, we saw several examples in which participants prioritized new information over existing beliefs, such as in the case of Mango and Max. However, their sources were a self-selected combination of interviews and online research, so they did not do the same type of source evaluation as in Kahne and Bowyer’s study about political messaging. Kahne and Bowyer state that it is imperative that educators work to combat directional motivation in information processing to foster critical thinking.

Our study raises questions about how young people process information that has been peer-reviewed or “sanctioned” as factual, and yet still represents a deficit-perspective of their own identity. Emily’s decision to reject study results about monkeys adhering to gender-normative choices shows directional motivation, to some extent, in that she prioritized her own existing beliefs over new information. But taken in the context of moral resistance, we understand her actions to be preserving a sense of her own humanity. The tension between the accuracy-framing of journalism and the social-emotional need to reject narratives that undermine marginalized identities is provocative. Part of this tension comes explicitly from how the journalism assignment was framed. Students were told that the story should be relevant to their lives. We did not tell students to completely detach from their story topics, however, we emphasized soliciting multiple perspectives as well as leaning into tension and disagreement.

Journalism education often entails an aspect of media literacy. We engaged students in activities to recognize stereotypes in media, find and verify information from reliable sources, and recognize bias in online news language. Therefore, future research might investigate whether journalism education could be an effective intervention toward fostering accuracy motivation, just as exposure to media literacy is for evaluating political messaging (Kahne and Bowyer, 2017). However, reporters will inevitably encounter situations in which “accuracy” is less straightforward, as Couldry (2012) has described. If young people have developed a critical consciousness around their own marginalized identities, how can this be applied to the information that they encounter (via interviews or online research), without compromising their journalism principles?

Organizations like YR Media, mentioned at the start of this paper, accomplish this in part by foregrounding young peoples’ identities and positionalities in their reported stories, and incorporating personal anecdotes and history as context for their investigations. Soep and Chávez wrote about finding point of voice—a combination of point of view and youth voice—which refers to the project of transforming a point of view into a journalistic statement in the context of a young person’s unique lived experiences. They wrote: “Without abandoning principles of rigorous reporting, espousing a point of view suggests that a detached perspective is not always the best or even a possible way to get to the truth” (Soep and Chávez, 2010, p. 69). For example, they wrote about young journalists who used their experiences of being racially profiled to report on racist policing in communities. Similarly, Couldry (2012) argued that journalists’ commitments to accuracy are complicated by attempts to uphold a value of sincerity. He wrote, “The disposition of sincerity refers to all the background checking and reflecting necessary to ensure that whatever one says is not just accurate in itself but fits more widely with the whole range of other things that one believes about the world. This is a more complex test since it is a commitment to truthfulness within one’s wider practice” (p. 192). This conflict echoes the tensions surfaced in this study. In school settings, it is not always possible to provide an intense amount of one-on-one editorial support during the reporting process to help young people do this important reflection about the information they find. Interventions and teaching on the classroom level can be developed to practice this nuanced form of media literacy.

Audience and accountability

Despite several attempts to partner with local outlets to publish student journalism pieces, we did not manage to secure a public audience for the stories in this study, partially due to heavy workloads and low staffing during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, this is a critical next step for this work. When students engage in critical digital distribution (Mirra et al., 2018) beyond the classroom they encounter a host of new dilemmas around accountability, audience, impact, interpretation, and objectivity. These are opportunities for civic reasoning to occur, as well as for young people to make an impact on their immediate media landscape. In a comprehensive review of 21st century literacy learning, Mirra and Garcia write: “Without efforts at authentic communication beyond the school building, students continue to be situated as outside of or unprepared for rigorous engagement in social life, thereby stifling opportunities for the kind of civic connection that 21st-century learning rhetoric champions” (2020, p. 489).

Although there was no public outlet for students’ final products, our participants did engage in interviews with community members during their production process. These interviews included police officers, psychologists, game developers, coaches, academic researchers, dentists, family members, and more. Occasionally, the outreach process yielded important learning moments. The journalism framework afforded opportunities for young people to engage with societal actors in powerful roles and notice whether their voices are taken seriously. Real audiences for students’ their stories would have allowed them to consider their journalism production process as an act of citizenship. Constructing journalistic counter-narratives and prioritizing marginalized voices to engage the public suggests an orientation toward what Westheimer and Kahne called “justice-oriented citizenship” (2004), which values debate, questioning, and engaging in actions that attempt to tackle root causes of injustice in society. More recently, Cohen et al. (2018) write about a “lived civics” approach to civic education that centers lived experiences with racism and identity in curriculum. Engaging journalism students in practicing moral resistance in their reporting, using race, identity and power as lenses through which to construct, produce, and distribute counter-narratives aligns with a “lived civics” pedagogical approach, and potentially positions journalism educators as civic educators.

In conclusion, critical digital pedagogy (Mirra et al., 2018) provided a useful framework for developing a multimedia journalism curriculum, that in turn created openings to foster civic reasoning with students. We welcomed the finding that some students rejected the information they found because it perpetuated deficit-narratives about their identity. Journalism educators should anticipate students’ moral resistance to encountering information that includes harmful ideologies and cultivate an editorial process through which students can act on this resistance. Specifically, journalism educators could facilitate workshops where students collectively evaluate their source materials using a set of humanizing/dehumanizing criteria or seek out expert sources from underrepresented communities. The entire class could engage up front with reflections on their own identities and consider stereotypes or discourses in popular media that are harmful. The class could collectively work to transform these stereotypes through journalistic storytelling. These ideas align with Aujla-Sidhu’s (2022) recommendations for decolonizing journalism education. They write, “It is important to question the production process and query whose perspectives were excluded from the story? Who was not interviewed? And what questions were not asked? Educators should require journalism students to critically reflect upon the construction of their work” (Aujla-Sidhu, 2022, p. 1649). Participants in this study were able to do this in post-study interviews, but this could be an essential pedagogical component. In addition to post-reporting reflection, students and journalism educators could facilitate pre-reporting community input sessions, where students host town-hall-style story idea meetings with their potential stakeholders / audiences, whether they be fellow members of their student body or members of their community. Soliciting input up front from the communal “we” about what issues are relevant and pressing, may encourage student reporters to communicate across difference, revise prior assumptions and feel a sense of accountability to others. In attempting to carry forward the NAEd’s vision of civic reasoning and discourse, educators may wonder what civic reasoning looks like in practice. Journalism pedagogy accomplishes this, by surfacing moments of revising assumptions, moral resistance, and autonomy in collective decision-making.