Common Language

school schools future social funding opportunities kids training responsibility employment participation participants illinois college academic stakeholders graduate truancy economic involvement communication trained diversity service goals business citizens intervention stakeholder program involved curriculum facilitators system dropout parents equitable achievement access group mentor parent students education attendance parental vision effective focus extracurricular possibilities career agree relationships children birth2work shared skills community organization organizations values facilitation county resources integrate teacher youth teaching support leaders graduation learning increase sharing success workforce partnership teachers process

Video News Coverage of the Event

Media Fun Fact

As part of our more comprehensive training for facilitators of the Birth2Work process, we spend a considerable amount of time on the importance of understanding media messages.  Why? Truth can be very hard to come by.  Reporters don’t intend to tell untruths, they simply make assumptions which can lead to serious misrepresentations of actual events.  

For example:  watch the video and read the news articles above.  Keeping your own experience with this conference in mind, pay special attention to the messages the media stories conveyed. While most of the stories' details about date, time, and place are accurate, there are minor AND major inconsistencies and assumptions with what was actually going on sprinkled throughout each article. Having attended the actual events, can you point out the "stock footage" versus event footage in the video? Can you identify the accurate statements versus the supposedly true statements, made on the basis of assumptions about the event, but not confirmed by the reporter? ??

One stand-out error is at the end of the video above. If you listening to the closing comments by the news anchor, he claims that identical events like the one that happened in Bloomington, were held around the country today.  Didn’t happen.   In fact no other Dropout Prevention Summit to date has engaged stakeholders in this way.  You were part of a revolutionary application of some outstanding systems process thinking to a complex social situation.   Dropout Summits will continue taking place throughout the coming months, but they will not be like this one.  ??

We only make mention of the inconsistencies in the reporting so that you too can begin to look at the messages media puts out with a new view and start to think about discerning fact from fiction. Our kids have generally no preparation for this and they spend a lot of time on their media diet.  In a world that gets more technologically advanced and media rich each day, Media Literacy should be on the forefront of everyone's mind.

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