Jessica Sierk partnered with the Digital Scholarship Group to include a series of digital scholarship workshops as part of her Critical Media Literacy Seminar. Sierk was a faculty fellow as the Mellon Digital Initiatives Faculty Fellowship Program.
An excerpt from the syllabus: “Critical Media Literacy (CML) is an especially important skill for educators to develop, as they often serve as filters of information for their students. Educators are tasked with deciding what information is valid and how it will contribute to their students’ developing understanding of both academic and non-academic issues, as they develop curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Four skills related to CML include responsible and responsive media access, analysis, evaluation, and creation. The first three skills entail that students can determine a source’s reliability and potential biases. As such, this class will facilitate the examination of academic “texts,” broadly defined (e.g., written, audio, visual, etc.), using different digital annotation tools. The last skill entails that students can not only critically consume media, but also responsibly create their own media. In that vein, students will be asked to create a digital narrative on a topic of their choice.”