One of our most committed overseas partners is the Communication University of China in Beijing. Over the past year, eight academics from CUC have attended Stony Brook sponsored workshops at the University of Hong Kong, and two have visited Stony Brook. Zhang Kai, a professor of journalism and communication and one of China’s leading authorities on media literacy and media education, has taken a leading role in working to adapt the Stony Brook news literacy curriculum to Chinese university requirements. She was a visiting scholar at Stony Brook in April 2013 and later proposed to CUC a full-credit course on news literacy. OPP Director Richard Hornik spent three weeks at CUC in September 2014 to launch that course. Other CUC scholars are using elements of the Stony Brook model to enrich other courses, build a course for high school students and to develop a program to teach basic news literacy concepts to children 6-8.
Elsewhere, academics who attended our two workshops in Hong Kong have come up with surprisingly creative ways to employ the essentials of News Literacy. A professor at Xi’an International University will use elements of the course when critiquing the monthly newspaper published by her journalism students. A graduate student at Beijing Normal University, China’s preeminent teacher training institution, is developing a textbook to be used by high school teachers in China. In addition, the English Department at Beijing Jiaotong University is exploring the use of elements of News Literacy as a way of teaching advanced English comprehension.
