{"id":110379,"date":"2026-08-27T13:27:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T13:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/?p=110379"},"modified":"2026-08-27T13:27:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T13:27:37","slug":"a-media-literacy-initiative-in-the-west-bank-advances-critical-thinking-for-an-ai-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2026\/08\/a-media-literacy-initiative-in-the-west-bank-advances-critical-thinking-for-an-ai-world\/","title":{"rendered":"A media literacy initiative in the West Bank advances critical thinking for an AI world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2014 Aug. 27, 2026 \u2014 For young people growing up amid war in the West Bank, learning to question a viral image or a trending influencer is not a classroom exercise. It can be a matter of safety. That is the central finding of \u201cMedia Literacy: Critical Thinking for an AI World<\/a>,\u201d a new report from the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island documenting a professional learning community that helped Palestinian educators teach youth to navigate propaganda, manipulated imagery, and AI-generated content in a time of conflict.

Across interviews and workshop observations, Palestinian educators consistently described media literacy in existential rather than academic terms, calling it \u201ca survival skill,\u201d \u201ca civic competency,\u201d and \u201ca form of social resilience.\u201d In an information environment saturated with emotionally charged political narratives, where conflict is monetized and even a reliable internet connection cannot be assumed, the program reframed media literacy from a media-studies elective into a defensive necessity.

The Program at a Glance<\/strong>
Running from October 2024 through June 2026, the program engaged 44 highly qualified Palestinian educators, 39 of whom began an online professional learning community; 17 completed the full 22 hours of instruction, an implementation plan, and the co-delivery of a youth workshop. Working in pairs through a \u201cpower of two\u201d model, faculty adapted media literacy key concepts and instructional practices into nine distinct, culturally grounded teaching frameworks, from a \u201cStop, Think, Verify\u201d golden rule to a focus on \u201cconflict entrepreneurs\u201d who profit from polarization.

Nine three-hour online workshops reached 138 West Bank youth ages 15\u201325, after war forced a pivot from in-person to online delivery in spring 2026. A social media campaign featuring young Palestinians\u2019 creative work reached an additional 4,904,355 views on Instagram, and combined with the recruitment campaign, the program\u2019s total documented reach exceeded 6.1 million.

Key Findings<\/strong>
The program\u2019s most striking result was a shift in how educators understood their own work. \u201cIn the West Bank, media literacy is not an academic exercise: it is a survival skill,\u201d said Renee Hobbs, professor at the University of Rhode Island\u2019s Harrington School of Communication and Media. \u201cWhen young people can recognize the point of view embedded in every message, they gain agency over an information environment that is otherwise structured against them.\u201d Palestinian faculty and youth alike came to treat critical media analysis as a condition of safety and social resilience rather than merely a media-studies elective.

The report also found that the approach worked best when it was hands-on and grounded in learners\u2019 own world. \u201cThe evidence was unambiguous: participation rose with open questions, group work, and real Palestinian examples, and it fell during long lectures,\u201d said Yonty Friesem, associate professor at Columbia College Chicago. \u201c\u2018Learning by doing\u2019 was not a slogan for these educators \u2014 it was the measured difference between a workshop that reached young people and one that did not.\u201d Observers found engagement climbed with visual stimuli, group work, meme creation, and real-life Palestinian examples, and dropped during instructor-dominated lectures.

A central strand of the program helped faculty and students confront the \u201cunreal realities\u201d of AI-generated media. As deepfakes, edited images, and fabricated news erode the old equation between seeing and believing, participants learned to recognize the mechanics of manipulation, from generative-AI fabrications to the \u201cconflict entrepreneurs\u201d who profit from polarization and the electronic armies of bots and fake accounts that drive online debate. In their own words, one youth participant wrote that \u201cAI today does not only produce images; it produces a parallel reality that deceives the senses,\u201d capturing a theme that recurred across the youth-created work. A stance of curious skepticism is endemic to media literacy learning.

Those qualitative shifts were matched by measurable gains. Faculty participants significantly increased their knowledge, confidence, and skills, with the strongest growth in collaborating to advance media education (+1.24 on a 7-point scale) and using storytelling to promote civic participation (+1.02). They rated the program\u2019s quality near the top of every scale, giving it a near-perfect recommendation score of 9.9 out of 10. Youth reported strong competencies as well: the highest-rated statement was that they could apply what they learned in life or at school (mean 4.20 of 5), and most agreed the program would positively affect their educational journey. An inductive analysis of 210 youth-created posts surfaced eight recurring themes, including media literacy as a personal \u201cshield\u201d and the discipline to \u201cpause before you share.\u201d

A distinctive finding was that trust, for Palestinian youth, is relational before it is institutional. Asked who actually influences them, young people most often named family, then friends and peers, then teachers. Social-media influencers are part of the mix, of course, but this pattern of respect for intimate trust networks has direct implications for how media literacy should be taught in the region.

Cultural Specificity and Local Leadership<\/strong>
Rather than importing a fixed curriculum, the program equipped Palestinian faculty to author their own. \u201cPalestinian faculty did not import a curriculum. Instead, they built nine of their own, in Arabic, using what they learned in the program and applying it to the images and claims their students were already arguing about online,\u201d said Bilal Younis, professor of education at Palestinian Technical University and local program lead. \u201cTeaching verification as an act of responsibility toward neighbors living through the same events is what gave the work real ethical weight.\u201d Working in pairs, faculty localized media literacy into nine culturally grounded frameworks, drawing on live issues, including Gaza war coverage, settler violence, fuel shortages, and the misuse of AI during war. In this program, students analyzed the very content they were already encountering and sharing as part of daily life.

The report argues that local leadership is the true foundation for a lasting media literacy network in Palestine. \u201cThis partnership demonstrated what Palestinian educators can accomplish when they are trusted to lead,\u201d said Nibal Khalil, a program partner with the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. \u201cThe educators trained through this program are now positioned to carry media literacy forward across schools and universities, building an informed generation that can engage with all media critically and protect itself from manipulation.\u201d Faculty participants strongly recommended that media literacy instructional practice be embedded in formal curricula and seek more ways to expand the work to more teachers and schools across Palestine.

What Comes Next<\/strong>
Though the U.S. State Department\u2013funded project has concluded, the work continues. During the 2026\u20132027 academic year, Renee Hobbs and the Media Education Lab will collaborate independently with the Yatta Institute for Higher Education, empowering program educators to take leadership roles. They have already begun to support \u201cMedia Compass,\u201d a youth-led initiative aiming to reach at least 300 Palestinian youth and train 15\u201320 peer facilitators across West Bank universities.

About the Program. <\/strong>Watch the video and learn more: https:\/\/bit.ly\/palestineML<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The University of Rhode Island\u2019s program, \u201cMedia Literacy: Critical Thinking for an AI World\u201d was made possible through a grant to the University of Rhode Island from the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, Public Diplomacy Section (Federal Award SIS50024GR0508-M002). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.

Contact<\/strong>
Renee Hobbs, Email: hobbs@uri.edu<\/a>
Professor of Communication Studies
Harrington School of Communication and Media
University of Rhode Island USA
Phone: 978 201 9799<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2014 Aug. 27, 2026 \u2014 For young people growing up amid war in the West Bank, learning to question a viral image or a trending influencer is not a classroom exercise. It can be a matter of safety. That is the central finding of \u201cMedia Literacy: Critical Thinking for an AI World,\u201d a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":110380,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12,18,1909,1905],"class_list":["post-110379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-arts-and-sciences","tag-harrington-school-of-communication-and-media","tag-international","tag-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110379"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110381,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110379\/revisions\/110381"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}