They Were Already Doing It

[Image: ALFINete]

I have been thinking about media literacy for years: reading the research, writing about it, building it into the way I think about communication and psychology. And yet the finding that stopped me most recently came from a group of Year 10 students in Australia whose first language is not English, who arrived here from somewhere else, and who were quietly doing something most adults I know don't do: asking "what do they want me to believe?" before sharing a political post.

That detail is from Jennifer Alford's 2023 study, which I've written about at length over at EMPOWERVERSE. Go there for the full analysis: the research design, the five strategies, the supporting evidence, and what it means for adult education. What I want to do here is something different: sit with what it felt like to read it.

The students who taught me the most were the ones navigating a world they hadn't grown up in, in a language they were still learning, on platforms designed to manipulate everyone equally.

The assumption I didn't know I had

When I think about who is vulnerable to online misinformation, I have to be honest: the image that comes to mind is not usually a teenager who just moved countries and is still learning the language. I picture someone older, more settled, less digitally native. That picture, I now know, is wrong in at least one direction, and probably in others I haven't examined yet.

What Alford found is that these students were not passive. They were not confused. They were doing exactly what good media literacy looks like in practice: checking the domain extension on a health website, scrutinising the wording on a product review, pausing before sharing. They had taken something abstract from a classroom (a concept, a question) and adapted it to the actual texture of their digital lives. The lesson had travelled. And it had travelled in people who, by the assumptions I didn't know I held, should have been among the least equipped to carry it.

What this changed for me

I study critical media psychology partly because I believe that understanding how media works is one of the most practical things a person can do. But reading Alford reminded me of something I can lose sight of when I'm deep in theory: this knowledge is not neutral, and it is not evenly distributed. The students in this study got some of it through an English class in an Australian high school. Most adult migrants learning English don't get a classroom equivalent at all. They navigate the same scams, the same misleading health websites, the same algorithmically optimised outrage, but without the scaffolding.

That gap is to me more than an education policy question, that is a question about who we think deserves to be equipped for the information environment we've all ended up in. The answer, I think, is obvious. Acting on it is a different matter.

I don't have a neat conclusion here. What I have is a renewed conviction that media literacy is not a luxury subject for academically inclined students. A question I keep returning to: who else is already doing this, in ways we haven't thought to look for?

The full research analysis is over at EMPOWERVERSE: Media Literacy 'To Go': What Teens Really Do When They Smell a Scam Online →

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