Activity 2: Deciding What’s Believable
Divide the class into four groups. Give each group one of the sentence fragments below and ask students to work together in their groups to develop five different plausible endings for their sentence. (Clicking on the sentence starters will take you to examples of how teachers at a conference workshop responded to this activity.)
As they share their responses, students can be invited to look for patterns across the four modalities. Often they will recognize that a criterion we use in evaluating the believability of new information is the extent to which it matches or fits with our existing world view. This is a critically important discovery for learners -- young and old alike. Appreciating the extent to which judgments are shaped by prior knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs and how attention and perception are affected by world view is a critical component of media literacy (Messaris, 1994).
This activity also helps learners to acknowledge the human limitations on the processes implicit in identifying what can be believed. It places substantial demands on individuals to communicate within a group and to engage in collaborative problem solving. One participant in the teacher workshop described the group dynamic at work by saying, “Before we could come up with this list, we had to get to the end of the universe where we acknowledged nothing is true and nothing is real, and then we kind of worked our way back.” Another teacher reflected on how this activity proved parallel to her own experience of having to change her vision:
The important thing is that no reality is true, and some people have hearing problems. So what you hear and what I hear is just different -- physically, it’s different. What you and I see is physically different, too. Since our personal experiences are different, we filter reality through that, and then we put an interpretation on it. Even though we can approximate reality if it’s something that everybody in the room agrees on, it still won’t be exactly the same reality for each one of us.
By positioning “Truth” as “truths” -- plural, lowercase, and resulting from a collaborative process of meaning making -- this activity demonstrates the role of media modality (seeing, reading, listening, viewing, experiencing) in evaluating the truth status of the different types of information we receive each day.
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted April 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232