We want to help you motivate your students
At News Decoder, we want to open young people’s horizons, deepen their understanding of the world and their place within it, help them feel part of a global community and empower them to amplify their voices and take action on issues and problems they feel are important.
Our educational approach emphasises real world, participatory and experiential learning and cross-border encounters. It has three main pillars: Storytelling, Cross Border Communication, and Interacting With Experts.
We call this transformative learning.
Storytelling
We believe young people have important things to say and deserved to be listened to. So we ask them to identify problems they see around them that they think are important. Then we ask them to tell what find in a story — through an article, podcast, video or multimedia.
To tell a good story you need to know what happened and why it is important. You need to make confusing information clear to the audience and base it on enough credible evidence that your audience will believe you. Because this kind of storytelling is difficult, we team students up with professional editors who can help them shape what they find in research and interviews into compelling stories that would interest not only their teacher, but their peers and family and someone they don’t know who lives halfway across the world. We do this through a process we call Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise. At each step, students work individually with a professional editor.
Students end up confident in their ability to assess the quality of information or the media they consume and confident in their own ideas.
We provide all the resources students need: articles and workshops on things like reporting and interviewing techniques and media literacy so that they can figure out how to tell reliable sources from those they should ignore, and writing, podcasting and video.
At News Decoder, we don’t expect our partner teachers to do any heavy lifting. That’s what we are here for.
Cross-Border Collaborations
As a global organization, we bring people together across borders — students with their peers in other countries and students with experts who help them explain the complicated problems they find in their research journeys.
In our Decoder Dialogues, we bring together students in live virtual roundtables to discuss controversial topics to a worldwide audience. In school to school webinars, students work with peers from another school in another country on a topic they choose and present their information in a live webinar open to the News Decoder network.
These cross-border student collaborations help young people appreciate different perspectives and understand global issues from the viewpoint of other cultures and different lived experiences. It enables them to develop their skills of communication and empathy as they work together to overcome misunderstandings and find solutions. It increases their appreciation of diversity and gives them a deeper understanding of the shared values that link us all.
Interacting with experts
With News Decoder, young people can learn directly from academic, industry and field experts. In our storytelling process, we encourage students to seek out experts and request interviews. These become transformative experiences as students find they have the ability to ask questions to important people and find that these people will treat them with respect. In preparing for these interviews they build research skills. In conducting interviews they learn the power of listening.
Ultimately they build confidence and capacity in their communication, reflection and critical thinking while deepening their knowledge of global issues.
Moreover, students have access to our global network of experienced journalists and teachers have the opportunity to bring these journalists into their classrooms, in person when practical and virtually for more remote locations.
We invite you to learn more about the services we provide to school members, how a partnership works and its benefits to students by visiting our Schools Program page.