Helping Students Manage Their Online Worlds
LJCDS leaders are featured in the National Association of Independent Schools’ spring magazine.
The ubiquity of online images and videos of war and terrorism; the sudden preponderance of AI tools for audio, video, and text; political extremism online; and ever-evolving research and policy related to social media platforms—these are just a few of the things Michelle Hirschy and Lucas Jacob address in their roles at La Jolla Country Day School (CA). Hirschy, director of wellness, and Jacob, director of writing, communication, and media literacy, often find themselves serving as each other’s sounding boards as they refine their relatively new roles in the independent school ecosystem. In this edited exchange, they discuss how schools can help students develop the skills and mindsets to deal with the digital world in ways that promote student well-being.
Michelle Hirschy: I’ve been a counselor for 16 years in three different states, mostly specializing in adolescence. Being a teenager has always been a challenging and exciting time, but the digital world has introduced new stressors, such as sleep disruption, cyberbullying, social media pressure, and increased anxiety. Counselors now spend a tremendous amount of time addressing issues that take place in virtual spaces and off campus because we’re seeing the considerable and significant impact they have on campus.
Lucas Jacob: I’ve been in the field of media literacy—and now digital and media literacy—off and on since the mid-1990s. Over the past 25 to 30 years, some of the basic things in my field, just like in yours, have stayed the same: teaching young people to evaluate different forms of media, analyze messages that they encounter, and think about the context around those messages. However, now the relationships that students have to texts—books, articles, written artifacts, film clips, podcasts—have merged with the relationships they have with each other, their families, and the world around them, from pop culture to politics to their own educations. That is a fundamental change. Both our fields have changed and moved so much closer to each other over the years.
Hirschy: In counseling and psychology, we know that exposure to live events and imagery relating to traumatic incidents has a substantial impact on people’s well-being. What is new is the way that it presents for our children in our world right now. The degrees of separation from an incident—you witnessed it, you saw parts of it, you heard about it, it happened to a friend or a friend of a friend—would potentially impact your reaction to a traumatic situation. Now, we insert the digital landscape into this, and maybe it’s a live stream. Maybe it’s unfiltered and graphic imagery that continuously gets pushed to you through a variety of algorithms. We’ve had to think about what information our children are engaging with and what that does to the developing brain. We can’t take away all the access; that is a door we have opened, and it will not be closed. But we need to teach children when, how, and maybe even if they should be engaging with particularly harmful content.
Jacob: I appreciate your use of the word “if.” In the past few years, in news and social media literacy, the word “if” has become much more central to the work. How do you teach yourself as an adult and then teach young people the skill of disengaging, not as a head-in-the-sand reaction to the world but as a necessary part of being literate? Being literate in a digital space means choosing when to encounter what messages, and when a message has been encountered, when to look away and stop listening because there’s nothing to be gained. You mentioned algorithms. We should also talk about the proverbial elephant in the room right now, which is generative AI.
