Background
A community centre in a rural township approached us with a challenge: many of their members reported feeling confused and anxious about the news. They struggled to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources, felt manipulated by partisan content, and were disengaging from news altogether — a pattern with concerning civic implications.
Standard media literacy curricula designed for school contexts were ill-suited to this adult, mixed-literacy group.
Programme Design
We co-designed a six-session programme with the community centre, using Article Dialogue as the primary tool. Sessions were structured around articles relevant to community concerns — local planning decisions, health policy, environmental issues.
Session Structure
Each two-hour session followed a consistent pattern:
- Warm-up discussion (20 min): What's been in the news this week? What felt confusing or concerning?
- Guided reading (45 min): Participants read a selected article using Article Dialogue, responding to scaffolded prompts and adding annotations.
- Group discussion (30 min): Facilitator surfaces key questions from the group's annotations and guides discussion.
- Reflection (25 min): What did I notice about my own reading? What will I do differently next time?
Article Selection
Articles were chosen to be:
- Relevant to community interests
- Drawn from diverse sources (local, national, international; mainstream, alternative)
- Contentious enough to reward critical reading without being so polarising as to shut down dialogue
Outcomes
Pre/post surveys and three-month follow-up interviews indicated:
- Significant increase in critical reading confidence: participants felt more equipped to evaluate what they read.
- Reported changes in news consumption habits: more source diversity, slower reading, greater use of cross-checking.
- Increased civic engagement: several participants reported taking action (writing to council, attending a meeting) based on better-understood local news.
Design Lessons
- Relevance is non-negotiable: Adults engage with critical reading skills when applied to content that matters to them.
- The annotation layer reduces intimidation: Structured prompts give permission to question — participants reported they had always wanted to push back but didn't know how.
- Community facilitators matter: Training a local facilitator to run the programme independently after the pilot was the key to sustainability.