Stories don’t just tell our history, they shape it. Scientists need to start telling better ones.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had the privilege of speaking to a big group of K-12 science teachers recently. One of the many interesting conversations I had at that meeting was with Kelly Melendez-Loaiza, who teaches at Mansfield High School in the southeastern part of Massachusetts. She’s one of a few teachers who have decided to tackle our current misinformation pandemic head-on, by inoculating kids against the threat.

Specifically, Kelly teaches a full course in her high school’s science department called “Science and the Media.” As described in the presentation (PDF) she and her colleagues gave at the meeting, the course covers a broad intellectual territory. She lays the groundwork for critical thinking, then has her students go through a series of exercises to analyze their own information consumption habits while learning about how the modern social media landscape really works. After that, they explore some major science topics with an eye toward how they’re covered in the news.