Information Literacy and the Israel-Hamas War

Syllabi and Teaching Sources

Topics

This war touches so many critical issues we discuss in academia. Here's how you might connect the current conflict to your course:

  1. Gender, sexuality, and pinkwashing
  2. Women and children and war
  3. Environmental impacts of war including using white phosphorous and other chemical weapons
  4. Impact of trauma on health and well being
  5. Impact of lack of food and water, impact to food systems 

Information Literacy Activities

Knowledge Practice/Outcome: understand how and why some individuals or groups of individuals may be underrepresented or systematically marginalized within the systems that produce and disseminate information.

Present students with various headlines and/or articles. Have students read through them and answer critical questions. This can be done using a chart or other worksheet, or large easel post-its. 

  1. What publication are you reading?
  2. What story being told in this article?
  3. Who is centered or who is the story being told about?
  4. What is the purpose of this article?
  5. What feelings or emotions arise in you as you’re reading this article?
  6. Would you share any of these articles with friends/family/social media followers? Why or why not?

Disposition/Outcome: see themselves as contributors to the information marketplace rather than only consumers of it.

Provide students with different examples of social media posts, then have them laterally read to understand what they’re reading and reflect on why the post was made, who made it, the purpose behind the post.

OR

Have students look at their own social media to identify what if any “news” information they’re receiving. Have them practice lateral reading to investigate claims.

Questions for Reflection:

  1. Who is posting and why?
  2. What are they sharing? Does their post have a bias?
  3. What emotions is the post stirring in you? Would you reshare?
  4. How can you verify information in the post is credible?

Knowledge Practice/Outcome: understand how and why some individuals or groups of individuals may be underrepresented or systematically marginalized within the systems that produce and disseminate information;

Historically, Palestinians have been maligned and disparaged as "other" and the media has created a narrative that enabled the normalization of brutality against them. Critical Cultural Literacy asks us to examine this history and our own information privilege to understand and to start to disentangle misleading, false, and harmful information. 

Read "Sweet Little Lies" and watch The Riz Test: how Muslims are misrepresented in TV and film. Then discuss why Muslim stereotypes are so ubiquitous and difficult to dispel. Then, steer the conversation to how this impacts our thinking when it comes to reading about and thinking critically about the current Israel-Hamas conflict using the following as a framing for the discussion:

Dr. Cooke sums up the current crisis: “We are bombarded with racist/racialized malinformation and conditioned to think that it’s normal and acceptable.”

  1. What steps are you taking to address your exposure to racist malinformation?
  2. Are there information sources you avoid?
  3. Are there sources you seek out?
  4. Are there ways we can push back against the systems of publishing and disseminating information that make malinformation so pervasive?

Creating Community in Classrooms for Difficult Conversations

See below for resources on creating community in classrooms.

Teach-ins


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