Thanks to the work being done by students in a fall U.S. history elective — American Choices & Voices: Ethics in Modern Society — Westover has won its second “Decoder in the Spotlight” award from News Decoder, a global educational news service for young people.
The monthly award recognizes students’ creative engagement with News Decoder, which “partners with schools around the world to teach media literacy and journalistic skills that extend students’ horizons and understanding of global issues. Our mission is to help students develop skills and behaviors that make them better global citizens.”
The elective is taught by Kate Taylor, Director of the Rasin Center for Global Justice and the School’s Global Programs. As noted in its course description, the class serves “as an opportunity to explore traditional ethical theories as well as those voices which are missing from the historical and contemporary narrative.” Students examine case studies which look at “the role ethical choices have played and continue to play in determining 21st century social norms, institutions, and the distribution of resources.”
In a November 30th post on the News Decoder website, its founder, Nelson Graves, praised the students in the class for “leveraging the educational news service to explore thorny topics ranging from the death penalty to whether animals should be kept in zoos.”
“At the start of the year,” Graves said, “Taylor’s students participated in a virtual workshop run by News Decoder explaining how the publishing process can help them identify a topic and then drill down into subject matter to produce a unique and distinctive story.”
As the fall semester has progressed, Graves explained, “thirteen students have pitched stories on topics as diverse as the effect of online learning on teenagers’ health, police brutality in New Jersey, whether poor people can afford to follow an environmentally sustainable lifestyle, whether abortions should be made available to all women, whether countries should distribute COVID-19 vaccines before they are certified as safe, and the impact of alcohol on youth.”
Each student, Graves added, has received detailed feedback from a News Decoder editor, to help them “narrow their research and produce original reporting.”
As a result, six Westover students submitted stories to News Decoder’s most recent Storytelling Contest — more than any of the 19 schools in News Decoder’s network.
Kate has coordinated the School’s partnership with News Decoder as one of its founding academic partners since 2015. In an interview for the News Decoder site, Kate said she decided to incorporate News Decoder’s resources into the Ethics class because she thought it “would fit very nicely with what we hope our students achieve through their writing.”
She said News Decoder complements the class’s framework “because one goal of the course is for students to be able to explore what it means to have a voice.”
“I want my students to engage in civil discourse responsibly,” she added, “and that means investigating the multitude of perspectives involved in contemporary issues. News Decoder’s process helps move them in this direction.”
Kate said the students in the course are still at work on their culminating projects.
Reflecting on the support that the Rasin Center has received through its partnership with News Decoder, Kate noted that “because our work centers on fostering global citizenship, it has been beneficial to incorporate partnerships, such as this one, in our collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to educating for these skills.”
