<aside> ⌛ Estimated student time on platform: 50 minutes (+ blending)
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<aside> 🗣 Lesson host: Tamerra Griffin, BuzzFeed News
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<aside> 3️⃣ Difficulty level: 3 (for middle school, high school and higher education) This lesson contains descriptions/ graphic images of historical events that some may find disturbing.
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<aside> ✔️ Assessments: 4 total (all teacher-evaluable)
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<aside> 🗒️ Standards: This lesson has Common Core, ISTE, C3 and state-specific alignments. Find your standards in the Checkology alignments dropdown menu to learn more.
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Learning objectives:
Essential questions:
Background:
Though the term “watchdog” is commonly associated with the press, ordinary people can, and often do, play this role as well. Not to be confused with working as a journalist — which involves gathering and verifying information from multiple credible sources, providing the necessary context and aspiring to be fair — being a “citizen watchdog” can document injustice and helps draw attention to it.
Though citizen watchdogs are not always reliant on technology, advances in digital media and information networks have dramatically expanded the opportunities for ordinary people to play this role. The four examples in the lesson highlight this fact. Had an eyewitness to the 1991 police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles not had a video camera handy, for example, that case would have likely gone largely unreported. Now people routinely use their smartphones to take videos of incidents they witness — and once those videos are posted online, they can go viral in a matter of minutes.
To provide additional background for this lesson, you might have students examine some historic examples of video shot by ordinary people — such as the famous film by Abraham Zapruder of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, or the footage of Jules and Gédéon Naudet of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Early examples of public commentary on the news — such as letters to the editor and call-in radio and television programming — can give you a way to open a discussion about the role of user comments on websites and discussions about news and news coverage on social media. You could also introduce students to the Freedom of Information Act, or the rise of open data portals, or the work of both ordinary people and activists on Twitter (for example, people who monitor police scanners and post what they hear).
In short, this lesson gives you numerous ways to engage students’ ideas about modern civic participation and the changing relationship between ordinary people and journalists, especially in breaking news environments.
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