San Anselmo's Ana Rodriguez Captures Prestigious Journalism Award

SAN ANSELMO, CA — Discerning truth from fiction in the digital age is no easy task, but Ana Rodriguez has proven herself to be up for the challenge.

The San Anselmo high school student won a prestigious award from a group promoting news literacy.

Rodriguez was named the News Literacy Project’s 2021 Gwen Ifill High School Student of the Year.

The incoming Archie Williams High School (formerly Drake High) junior developed an interest in media literacy when it became apparent to her that it wasn’t so easy to discern truth from fiction on social media platforms.

“It was definitely harder to identify the kinds of things that were real or not,” Rodriguez told the NLP.

“I don’t want to be sharing false information to the people around me.”

Learning about bias and misinformation helped Rodriguez complete an important project in her social studies and English classes that explored pseudoscience and, specifically, racism in science.

“For the project, I had to research several pieces of information that provided reliable facts and supported data, as well as researching those who did not provide effective information,” Rodriguez wrote in her essay for NLP.

“In our world, almost every situation we choose to participate in is based mainly on the information we acquire from it.”

Rodriguez credits her development of media literacy skills to the use of Checkology, a media literacy educational platform developed by the NLP.

“Being able to distinguish reliable and trusted information from the detrimental bias has been of great importance in my life,” Rodriguez said.

“It has allowed me to help my parents and other family members during our time in the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Leffel noticed immediately how the news literacy concepts resonated with Rodriguez. “There is an unmistakable spark in a student’s countenance that appears when they have decided to grab hold of their learning. Even in a classroom mediated by distancing guidelines, I could see it in Ana’s masked face in English class as we began an interdisciplinary project that focused on challenging pseudoscientific claims,” he said.

And she got that chance when her English teacher Matthew Leffel, who nominated her for the Gwen Ifill High School Student of the Year Award, introduced his 10th-graders to Checkology® this past school year.

The award is named after the distinguished journalist who died in 2016.

Ifill became the first Black woman to host a nationally televised U.S. public affairs program in 1999 when she took the helm at PBS's Washington Week.