Teaching Students About Corporate Influences in a Curriculum

Curricular tools with explicit corporate or product interests circulate widely in schools. The reality is that the classroom tools we rely on are often loaded with agendas, and it’s not always obvious. Curricular tools, textbooks, and online instructional resources are all created by someone somewhere. And those creators have perspectives, beliefs, and sometimes vested interests.

This can show up as incorrect information, including disseminating false or misleading information. In an alarming example, a review of 30,000 climate change curricular tools and online lessons for teachers revealed that almost 80 percent did not include accurate information and were unsuitable for classroom use.

This is sometimes because of dated information, but other times, it is more deliberate, as when a book titled Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming was sent to more than 200,000 U.S. science teachers. Instead of reflecting accurate scientific information, this book includes false information that doubts the scientific consensus around the climate crisis. It was developed and paid for by an advocacy think tank with specific goals.

Other examples include instances when industry has pressured school districts to omit particular narratives. In developing a place-based, community-developed textbook, one Alaska school district discussed a nearby gold mine, including a range of perspectives from the community, but was then pressured to remove the content and yielded to corporate interests. In another example, classroom readers were created as part of a partnership between Scholastic and the American Coal Foundation, leading to pro-coal industry viewpoints showing up in unexpected places, including skimmed-over environmental and social harms and risks of coal extraction and mountaintop removal.

These instances underscore the need for educators to be vigilant in vetting materials, recognizing that even seemingly reputable sources can harbor hidden agendas, necessitating a robust approach to media and information literacy both for ourselves and for students.

How to Spot Corporate Influences in YOur Curriculum

So, how do we, as educators, navigate this minefield? Media literacy strategies offer important tools to equip ourselves and our students to analyze information landscapes intentionally, including the curricular resources we evaluate for use in our classrooms.

Employ lateral reading: Lateral reading involves evaluating the credibility of a source by leaving the original source and consulting other sources. Instead of reading “vertically” (staying within the same website), you read “laterally” (opening new tabs to check sources).

Look closely at creators and funding: Analyzing who has created or funded the creation of instructional materials can shed light on the unarticulated goals of curricular material. We might consider if that funding has shaped particular inclusions, exclusions, or frames.

Consider motivated reasoning and frames for understanding information: Consider the role that motivated reasoning might play in our curricular choices and how those choices may influence students.

Responding to Hidden Interests

To effectively respond to the pervasive issue of hidden agendas that surface in classroom materials, we might invite students to consider how and why this happens and use this to deepen instruction around media and information literacy. Additionally, it is essential to share findings and resources with fellow teachers to raise cognizance and collaborate on developing strategies for addressing hidden agendas within educational materials, ensuring a collective effort to equip students with the necessary tools to navigate the complexities of information consumption.

Draw student attention to interests: Engaging students in discussions about the potential influences and biases behind different sources of information and hidden interests in classrooms can be a powerful tool to combat and illuminate these interests. Once, a prominent skin care company sent me free samples and lesson plans on personal hygiene to use as I taught middle school health. This provided my students an opportunity to explicitly consider product placement and consumer pressures in schools and investigate why this happened and who had a vested interest in my teaching of those lessons as they were written.

Use it as a media literacy lesson: If we spot hidden interests in a text or lesson, we can use it as a text for study in media and information literacy instruction. The ultimate goal is to empower students to become discerning information consumers, capable of navigating the digital landscape with confidence and skepticism, and help them identify why and how hidden interests might be working to capture their thinking.

Strong models of media literacy lessons that can be adapted are available from Civic Online Reasoning, the National Association for Media Literacy Education, and Media Mentorship. Although curricular tools and classroom materials are not what we typically think of when we imagine media literacy lessons, the strategies from this field help decipher and respond to hidden agendas, and these skills will prove valuable and transferable to students to other information spaces like social media.

Avoid use: If we don’t have time to fully unpack these interests and how they are surfacing in a lesson or classroom material, it’s likely best to avoid using them. We don’t want to leave students hanging without ways to make sense of hidden interests and tools to analyze incomplete, inaccurate, or profit-driven lessons.

By actively addressing and identifying hidden agendas in educational materials, we can make purposeful choices and empower our students through this real-world application of media literacy frameworks to support critical thinking and informational literacy and avoid unintentional interests from using our classrooms as a podium.