As the curriculum continues to advance, LFA finds importance in having study halls and enforcing media literacy as a way of helping freshmen navigate their first year and growing a societal understanding within our world. Media literacy is a class introduced only to freshmen this year and provides information on technology, how to research, and much more in order to help the freshman with later classes that use these skills.
“The media literacy class is a foundation class for all freshmen,” said Ashley Kolovitz, Information & Media Literacy Librarian. She continued to state “It teaches critical thinking skills, with an inquiry-based approach.” This includes learning a broad range of topics from “understanding how to use technology responsibly and ethically to research methodology” and everything in between. With such, students can expect all kinds of interesting and fun projects that involve learning specialties, such as 3D-printing, social media, and more.
Many of the skills freshmen will learn have been “interwoven into other curriculum” stretching over all four years.
Since the sophomore Journalism I class’s media bootcamp unit already focused on some of this content, next year’s Journalism I sophomores will need to receive more advanced content for that unit, having already progressed through this new freshmen course. Director of Journalism, Mandy Krause noted, “It’s now required by the state of Illinois to have media literacy as part of the curriculum, and while LFA, as an independent school, doesn’t need to strictly adhere to that, I think it shows how vital these skills are, and I’m glad that now all students will get exposed to them when first coming into school.
The media literacy class aims to bring all these skills together, as well as other topics. Kolovtz stated that they, “decided to have a standalone course due to a number of factors, the main one being efficiency” in explaining why they felt the need to create the new class. The information that they are learning is something that is “transferable throughout their four years at LFA and beyond.” It teaches students how to navigate the web and research correctly, both of which are important skills applicable wherever you go. The course also focuses on navigating “fake news,” which is another skill that needs to be taught these days. Kolovitz says that “reading the news is a skill you’re going to continue [using] your whole life.”
Current freshmen perceive the class as a way of learning about the tools needed for future years. Fitz Knight ’27 stated that the class, “helps teach students about school work and homework” so that they can be prepared for this year and many years to come. The research skills that they learn are applicable to many aspects of their future lives. Everything that media literacy teaches helps students develop a better understanding of LFA’s classes.
