Context, Objectives, & Rationale

Context

The official story of an event, the one that enters the history books and is repeated for generations, is often written by the victors in order to cement their place of power. Truth becomes subjective; truth becomes shaded with bias. We see this occurring in The Ballad of Black Tom. What exactly happened during the raid on Parker Place? Well, that depends. In this activity, students retell the events of the raid from the point of view of an assigned news outlet, each with its own bias, and identify the bias in their classmates’ retellings.

Learning Objectives

Students will:

1. Strengthen the new literacy skills performance and simulation by writing, performing, and posting onto Flipgrid a newscast from their assigned point of view in which they retell the events of the Parker Place raid.
2. Demonstrate in their newscast how bias affects the way events are narrated.
3. Identify the ways in which their peers have used bias to frame events by responding via Flipgrid.

Rationale

Students will use Flipgrid, an online video discussion platform, to post their retellings and respond to their classmates’ retellings of what happened during the Parker Place raid. I’ve selected Flipgrid because it challenges students to develop the new literacy skills of performance and simulation (Marsland, 2017). A newscast is a type of performance. It’s scripted, but the newscaster is not a robot. Their tone and body language may be improvised given the situation. Also, since each student is assigned a very different news outlet, they’ll have the opportunity to discover how bias informs the way news is framed both as a narrative and as a performance. In addition to developing a student’s performance skills, the Flipgrid newscasts and responses further their simulation skills. Simulation is “the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes” (Marsland, 2017). Writing and performing newscasts is a real-world process; responding to newscasts and identifying how a biased opinion affected retelling of events is an act of interpretation.

Other design elements are meant to positively impact students’ learning. For example, I’ve utilized the self-explanation principle to increase germane load (Van Merriënboer & Sweller, 2010). Evidence of the principle can be seen in the requirement that students respond to a peer’s Flipgrid post. Using the prompts I’ve provided, which offer scaffolding and maintain germane load, students explain what biases are present and how those biases affect the story’s telling, thus demonstrating their mastery of the ideas.

An additional design element is the GIF at the bottom of the page. The GIF features the fictional (and rather hilarious, in my opinion) newscaster Ron Burgundy. The GIF is an affective feature aimed at appealing to a student’s sense of humor. Including decorative media is not simply to amuse me, however. Mayer (2014) states that including emotionally appealing graphics that are relevant to the lesson can increase a student’s motivation and keep germane load high.

References

Marsland, B. Digging into the social and affective aspects of new media [D2L page]. Retrieved from https://d2l.msu.edu/d2l/le/content/585444/viewContent/5298589/View

Mayer, R. (2014). Incorporating motivation into multimedia learning. Learning and Instruction, 29, 171-173.

Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Sweller, J. (2010), Cognitive load theory in health professional education: Design principles and strategies. Medical Education, 44(1), 85–93. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03498.x