Miami Students Ask, "Who gets the microphone, and why?"

Renee O’Connor created the lesson plan “Truth Be Told: What Matters to Us” for her African-American studies and English language arts classes at Miami Norland Senior High in Miami, Florida, as part of the Spring 2025 Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellowship “Global Issues, Local Contexts: News for Civic Knowledge and Engagement.”

At the conclusion of the Fellowship, O’Connor shared the following reflections on her experience developing and teaching the lesson.

For fourteen years I have taught African American history and global studies at Miami Norland Senior High in Miami Gardens, and every single semester reminds me that the zip code outside our windows guides the lessons inside our walls. Our students are almost entirely Black or Afro-Caribbean, with family stories that stretch from Kingston to Port-au-Prince. Local headlines often shrink Miami Gardens to crime statistics, yet my daily view is a mosaic of corner stores that greet kids by name, churches that double as community centers, and households where cousins span three generations under one roof. Many teens clock out of part-time jobs or finish babysitting before they ever open a notebook, so my planning has to honor both their brilliance and their real-life responsibilities.

Those truths shaped the media literacy project I designed with support from the Pulitzer Center. We started by charting our own news habits and tallying how often local outlets frame our city in hopeful or hurtful ways. That warm-up gave students something solid to compare with the deeper work to come, including content analysis of newspaper articles, surveys they built themselves, and focus group conversations that felt more like kitchen table talk than research. I introduced them as emerging scholars because their lived experience is a primary source, not just background color.

Here is the big takeaway I want fellow educators to hear: When students side-eye the nightly news, they are not tuning out. They are already practicing a sharp critical literacy that asks, “Who gets the microphone, and why?” Our job is to hand them sharper tools, clear ethical guidelines, and an audience that is willing to listen. Once we did that, the classroom transformed into a buzzing research lab and a launchpad for civic action, proof that rigorous scholarship and cultural pride grow best in the same soil.

Thank you to the Pulitzer Center for once again allowing me and my students the opportunity to engage in “real-world” learning!