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Finding Common Ground

With Peter DeWitt & Michael Nelson

A former K-5 public school principal turned author, presenter, and leadership coach, Peter DeWitt provides insights and advice for education leaders. Former superintendent Michael Nelson is a frequent contributor. Read more from this blog.

Social Studies Opinion

The Need for Media Literacy and Civics Education Isn’t Just for Students

By Peter DeWitt — February 03, 2021 1 min read
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Truth Decay - A Seat at the Table

On Thursday, Jan. 28, for Education Week’s A Seat at the Table, I moderated a chat with Jennifer Kavanagh and Alice Huguet from the Rand Corp. Kavanagh is the director of the Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program in the RAND Arroyo Center and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corp. She also leads RAND’s Countering Truth Decay initiative, a portfolio of projects exploring the diminishing reliance on facts and analysis in U.S. political and civil discourse.

Huguet is a policy researcher at RAND. She is interested in K-12 educational policies that influence the academic and life opportunities of students attending urban schools. Huguet’s research explores a variety of topics, including evidence-based decision-making; social and emotional learning; media-literacy education; alternative teacher-preparation programs; school leadership; and data- and instructional-coaching.

During the conversation, we discussed truth versus facts; the need for media literacy and civics education, not just for students but also adults; and the history of truth decay in our country from the very beginning. Click here to register and watch the show on-demand. It is well worth the hour.

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The opinions expressed in Finding Common Ground With Peter DeWitt & Michael Nelson are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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