After leading Newsday to multiple Pulitzer Prizes, Howard Schneider embarked on a new career in public education as Founding Dean of Stony Brook University’s new School of Journalism.
At a time when the traditional newspaper business model was collapsing and the audience for online journalism exploded, Schneider went to work with Stony Brook University President Shirley Kenny to build what is now the first School of Communication and Journalism in the 64-campus State University of New York system.
While teaching a course in the ethics and values of the American press, Schneider realized that a large cohort of students were either lost in the digital flood of information or had adopted a defensive cynicism, unwilling to trust that information could be anything other than spin.
Seeing connections across academic disciplines, he collaborated with experts in the hard sciences, social sciences and the humanities at Stony Brook to build a course that helped students understand their own biases as well as the importance of reliable information to their inherited role as stewards of a democracy.
Thus emerged Stony Brook’s unique mission: training the next generation of citizen news consumers is at least as important as training the next generation of journalists. With start-up funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the school developed the nation’s first undergraduate course in News Literacy and launched the Center for News Literacy to share and propagate its work with educators and the public.
Since its founding in 2006, the Center has taught News Literacy to over 11,000 Stony Brook undergraduates across all academic disciplines and has shared its curriculum with academics at several dozen universities in the U.S. and overseas.Through the Overseas Partnership Program, the Center has brought News Literacy to countries including Poland, Russia, China (Hong Kong), Vietnam, and Myanmar.
In 2017, with its partner at the University of Hong Kong, the Center launched an open online course, Making Sense of the News, on the educational platform Coursera that has attracted more than 20,000 learners around the globe.
In recent years, recognizing that the explosion of smartphones and social media had radically altered the communication ecosystem for younger students, the Center established the Institute for News Literacy Education to partner with school districts interested in adapting their curriculum for middle school and high school students. The institute conducts teacher training and curriculum workshops and offers ongoing support and resources to the schools.
A grant to further civics education from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation also enabled Center staff to train middle school, high school, and community college educators in the Chicagoland area to teach News Literacy.
Beyond our individual partners and collaborators, the Center’s online Digital Resource Center serves as a clearinghouse for innovative news literacy curriculum materials for students, teachers, and the general public.