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campusreview.com.au
After the facts
An Australian university is set to
teach a subject on fact-checking,
but is it too little, too late?
By Loren Smith
R
MIT is heralding the introduction
of Australia’s first ‘fact-checking’
university subject. The course,
which will be mandatory for first-year
BA (Journalism) students, will include
the teaching of skills like detecting
Photoshopped images, using Google
Earth to verify the location of photos and
videos, and identifying fake social media
accounts.
“Journalists need to think like they are
an investigator, not just a journalist who’s
just gathering information and putting
it together,” journalism lecturer Gordon
Farrer said.
“This subject aims to teach the practical
critical analysis skills needed to sort
fact from fiction, opinion from reliable
reporting.”
A micro fact-checking credential will
be available to all RMIT students. In
explaining why the university is offering
it, the dean of the School of Media and
Communication, Professor Lisa French,
acknowledged the importance of
critical thinking.
“We know these critical analysis skills are
in demand across a range of industries,”
she said.
The home of the RMIT ABC Fact Check
unit, the university hopes the subject will
consolidate it as the academic home of this
enterprise. But is teaching certain first-year
university students one subject on critical
thinking, and offering a micro-credential to
others, too little, too late?
Experts argue that capabilities, including
critical thinking, should be prioritised in
syllabuses, beginning in preschool. Yet a
vast proportion of educators don’t even
know how to teach these skills. Dr Jennifer
Smith, a former English teacher and
developmental psychologist, has witnessed
this at many schools, and at the school she
volunteers at in Sydney’s West.
“I think that teachers might at times imply
critical thinking skills in their teachings, but,
unfortunately, they don’t teach them in a
manifest, organised way,” she said.
“From my experience, it appears
that teachers teach information that
contributes to knowledge ... that aligns
with what we consider to be ‘intelligence’,
but they don’t teach students to think in
a rational way. The two are very different
– critical thinking falls under the umbrella
of rational thinking. This is a critical skill in
today’s information age. Yet it is ignored by
our education system.”
Smith thinks that while RMIT has noble
intentions, its fact-checking offering (“an
important element of critical thinking
because it’s about calibrating evidence and
then making a decision about whether facts
are believable or not”) is probably a case of
“too little, too late”. Like the Mitchell Institute,
she believes that critical thinking training
should be extended to all students, and
should begin when they are in kindergarten.
For example, five-year-olds can learn it while
listening to Dr Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat.
“Towards the beginning of story, the cat
assures the fish it will come to no harm if it
is balanced on his umbrella. Unfortunately,
once this occurs, the fish falls into a teapot.
I ask students: ‘To what extent should the
cat be believed in the first place? What is
the chance of the fish not falling into the
teapot?’ Those are the sorts of questions
you can ask students at a very young age to
encourage critical thinking.”
She hopes the potential national
curriculum decluttering will result in an
increased emphasis on critical thinking.
“The postmodern view of the world has
led to an abandoning of reason,” she said.
“To equip students with the tools to
negotiate the future, they need to accept that
there are universal facts, and learn to weigh
statistical, scientific evidence. This is the only
way to equip students to face the explosion
of information they will face in the future.” ■
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