Professor Alison Trope uses Create to Learn in ASCJ 200, a course called “Discover, Deconstruct, Design: Navigating Media and News in the Digital Age,” which is offered at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication. This team taught course addresses both media and news consumers and contributors at a time when the digital revolution is spawning an unprecedented daily flood of content. This media environment is evolving rapidly, creating a new set of powerful players. The influence these players possess and implications of their reach are often poorly understood and unquestioned. The mark of a well-educated person in the 21st century is the ability to critically navigate this contested and integrated terrain: to understand, employ, enjoy and help build and shape the media landscape we now inhabit. Only by understanding our own roles as consumers and producers of media can we begin to make sense of the environment around us. The health of our democracy depends on enlightened and engaged citizens who can critically analyze the range of information and content disseminated from an equally wide range of sources and platforms. The course examines new avenues of civic participation and the critical importance of ethical standards in communicating messages. Students will learn how to apply their critical-thinking and analytic skills to a range of media and news production and consumption The critical thinking skills developed in this course will be applicable to many fields of study, from science to the arts.
