Literacy Day
A New Youth Media Model for Prairie Public?
Davin Wait | December 16, 2021
On October 27, 2021, only about six weeks after I joined Prairie Public Education Services, my colleague Troy and I drove out of a Fargo rainstorm on our way to Mandan and Fort Yates. Troy was in his second week with Prairie Public, and we would meet our department manager Tim at Mandan High School that afternoon.
The trip was our first remote project as a new education team, whose staff and operations had been heavily diminished throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and it offered us a preview of a new model of public school engagement we hope and expect to repeat throughout 2022.
Our objective on this westward trip was two-fold. First we would drop off a check so Dr. Lucia Shelley, a Spanish and ESL teacher at Mandan High School, could purchase a new video camera. After that we would venture south along the Missouri River to Fort Yates, where we would take part in an annual event at Standing Rock Community School called “Literacy Day.”
We arrived at Mandan High School for Dr. Shelley's last class of the day. Dr. Shelley has been a participant in our Youth Media Cohort, a small group of regional educators exploring how resources from Prairie Public, PBS, and NPR (like PBS Learning Media, Student Reporting Labs, and the Student Podcast Challenge) can help promote media literacy and media production skills in their classrooms. Tim presented a check to Dr. Shelley, we took some photos, and we spent 30 minutes sitting in the back of a bright classroom decorated with drawings and Spanish conjugations watching ESL students learn the ins and outs of documentary production. Later that night we remarked on the tremendous challenges our teacher and student collaborators around the state face, including the limitations of school media budgets and course prep time, as well as classrooms full of students from widely disparate backgrounds. As far as we could tell, Shelley and her students have been doing a wonderful job.
We arrived at Standing Rock that night and checked into our hotel rooms at Prairie Knights Casino on the outskirts of Fort Yates. Shortly after check-in, we had dinner with several administrators from Standing Rock Community School. We chatted about Literacy Day, our work in education and their lives in Standing Rock. As you might expect, we were curious about their experiences during the DAPL protests five years prior. In the weeks since, we've reflected on their memories that few reporters had ventured across the Missouri River to speak to the educators of the community in question.
In past years, Prairie Public has collaborated with Standing Rock Community School on a fun story time event that brought high school students into elementary classrooms where they read aloud to elementary students. The program is similar to a national peer reading initiative called Reading Buddies. Standing Rock coordinated the activities and Prairie Public provided the books.
Literacy Day is a popular event. It’s a celebration of reading, community and storytelling. There’s good, warm feelings all around. Elementary students are excited about meeting “the big kids,” high school students are happy about time away from their usual classes, as well as the opportunity to serve as positive role models for younger kids, and faculty enjoy seeing their students bonding over stories. In many cases their former students read to their current students. The day is a wonderful demonstration of the ways literacy and storytelling unite us as communities, across generational divides.
However, we arrived that evening on Standing Rock Reservation with a slightly different idea about the day ahead.
Like many other public media organizations, Prairie Public has contemplated its role in youth entertainment and education, particularly after the the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (of Sesame Workshop fame) published “The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media“ this spring. That report has caused waves in our industry, as it outlines the various ways American youth’s media skills, media literacy, and public media engagement have changed in recent years.
As the title of this article might suggest, one of its glaring conclusions is that public media organizations like PBS and Prairie Public are reaching young learners with content like Sesame Street and Molly of Denali and older adults with content like PBS NewsHour and Prairie Mosaic, but missing teens and tweens who are looking for more authentic, interactive content that speaks more directly to their lives and lifestyles. With this research in mind, our department has moved to develop more youth media opportunities, from the youth media cohort mentioned above to new perspectives on our existing programs.
So on this Literacy Day, we dove into a new direction. In addition to the several hundred books we loaded into our van, we brought video cameras, audio recorders, and several softbox lights. We were going to talk about new literacies, too – like digital media literacy. We challenged Standing Rock High School students to capture the events of Literacy Day like journalists. To help tell this story themselves. We gave a crash course in lighting and videography, discussed some of the finer points of conducting interviews and let them work. Their early confusion, and in some cases reluctance, soon gave way to confidence and enthusiasm. They explained their choices to interview this teacher or that student, to capture establishing shots outside of the school and how they might prepare follow-ups for the short list of suggested questions we provided them. Our student journalists talked about their YouTube and TikTok channels and wondered aloud about lives in journalism. Later that afternoon, after we shared pizza and gifts, we talked with them about media literacy. We highlighted how they might evaluate online sources and asked them what they knew about ideas like propaganda, biases, targeted advertising and sponsored content.
As 2021 comes to an end, we’re planning the year ahead at Prairie Public Education Services and writing grants to support our programming. We’re in the process of securing funding for additional “Literacy Day” events, and we hope to improve and streamline the model we developed at Standing Rock. In fact, we're also in talks with Standing Rock about how we might return next fall with stronger resources and better preparation to continue this tradition. Look for future updates.
Of course, we also welcome your questions or comments if your school would like to take part, as well.
Happy Holidays from Prairie Public.
We hope your New Year is filled with good news and better stories.