Teaching in a 'Post-Truth' World

The analysis and the poem (“Tree Octopus: A Found Poem”) that follow are based on my interview with “Kelly,” one of the five teachers participating as practitioner-inquirers in my dissertation research on critical media literacy. Kelly is a white woman in her late 20s, a graduate of the English education program at Purdue who has been teaching eighth grade English at her current school, “Geronimo Junior High,” since completing her degree. I conducted this semi structured interview on Dec. 20, 2023, over Zoom, and transcribed it during the week of Jan. 10, 2024, with the help of Otter.ai, a subscription-based artificial intelligence transcription tool. More precisely, I read through the Otter.ai.-generated transcript while listening to the recording of the interview, pausing to edit the transcript where necessary.

In deciding on a method of analysis for this interview, I drew mainly on Shenfield and Pendergast’s (2021) chapter on “Revealing Good Teaching Practice through Interview Poetic Transcription.” Like the exemplars presented in that chapter, my poetic analysis is an example of vox participare—a “poem crafted from interview . . . data” (p. 352). Unlike the authors of that chapter, I did not first code the transcript or read it with a particular research question in mind. However, my process did involve carefully rereading the transcript and “selecting particular moments of dialogue that stood out for their content and/or evocations” (p. 355). In doing this, I drew on my experience both as a journalist and as a journalism and literature teacher. Unlike literary writers, journalists do not typically work to develop a distinct personal “voice,” instead adopting an institutional voice and highlighting the voices of their subjects through direct quotations. Knowing which words and phrases to select as direct quotations takes practice, but in teaching students this skill, I often pointed to the features of poetry: when people unconsciously use literary devices like imagery, figurative language (metaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification), and sound devices (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, repetition) in their speech, those tend to make good “soundbites.” Therefore, as I reread the transcript of my interview with Kelly, I highlighted phrases that struck me as interesting soundbites, often because they included some poetic feature. For example, the sentence “God, there could be—there’s got to be—something out there that’s easier than this,” the first two lines of the poem (which I chose to repeat at the end of the poem) is an example of epizeuxis, the repetition of a word or phrase in immediate succession, typically within the same sentence, for vehemence or emphasis. Many of the phrases I highlighted included various kinds of repetition (see stanzas 4, 8, and 18-20). The phrase “It leaves the kids in no man’s land” is an example of a metaphor; Kelly is figuratively describing the wide gap that often exists between the beliefs of teachers and the beliefs of students’ parents. “Twenty-first century hieroglyphics” is also a delightful metaphor.

After highlighting phrases I wanted to include in my poem, I assembled all the phrases in order in a document. I then began to rearrange some of them, grouping together phrases that seemed thematically connected. While most of the phrases in the poem appear in the sequence in which they appeared in the original interview, I did reorder a few. As I grouped phrases, I also eliminated unnecessary words and, in a few cases, changed or added a word to clarify the meaning. Through this process, I began to see the phrases coalesce around the five topics that became the major sections of the poem: “teacher,” “propaganda,” “the word and the world,” “fake news,” and “objectivity.” Several of these sections were, from the beginning, eight lines long (four sets of two lines). Others were longer, but to give the poem structure, I decided to eliminate lines from the longer sections so that ultimately, each section consisted of four two-line stanzas. I tinkered with each stanza, adding punctuation, sometimes moving a word from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and occasionally eliminating another word until the poem read in a way that I found both satisfactory and true to the interview. Finally, I selected one short phrase from the poem, “Tree Octopus,” as the title. I chose that phrase because it’s evocative and because it hints at what’s at the heart of the poem and the interview—the idea that kids need teachers to help them understand that they can’t trust everything they encounter in the world, and especially in the media, because everyone has baggage (stanza 1), things aren’t always as they appear (stanza 2), the world must be read like a book (stanza 3), there are people who want to fool you (stanza 4), and no one is truly neutral (stanza 5).

I’d like to comment briefly on just a couple of the specific insights I gained through this process. First, I hadn’t thought much before about the connection Kelly made between propaganda and “teacher indoctrination.” That is, in discussing propaganda and how to teach about it, she made the point that some people are accusing teachers of, essentially, being propagandists, and that this is creating a wide gulf between teachers and parents. Second, I loved Kelly’s observation that “We read everything around us: Reading is not just opening a book.” It reminded me of what Freire said about “reading the word and the world”—hence the title I gave that section of the poem. In teaching kids critical media literacy, we’re teaching them to read in a much broader way than we traditionally have—to critically examine the world around them, including media of all kinds.

References

Shenfield, R., & Pendergast, M. (2021). What makes an effective teacher? Revealing good teaching practice through interview poetic transcription. Analyzing and interpreting qualitative data: After the interview, 351-370.

Tree Octopus: A Found Poem

Click the play button above to hear Kelly read the poem.

I. Teacher

God, there could be—there’s got to be— 
Something out there that's easier than this.

I am a teacher, and I can assure you:
No day is boring.

(I just didn’t want to turn into my mother,
Teenage angst or whatever.)

These kids—they’re something else:
These kids come with their own set of baggage.

II. Propaganda

You don't have to take everything at face value. 
(Also, please don't take everything at face value!)

There are people who say we're indoctrinating students,
People who are up in arms on one side or another:

It leaves the kids in no man's land. Your
Loyalty might be to your family, but do you even know

Why you're saying what you say, or
Why you’re believing what you believe?

III. The Word and the World

We read everything around us:
Reading is not just opening a book.

Have you ever sent an emoji? Like,
You have to be able to read what that is saying.

How are they using color? How are they using fonts?
What does this communicate to you?

Twenty-first century hieroglyphics: emojis, memes—
All of it has its own grammar.
 
IV. Fake News

What state are we in as humans, 
When we're taking in certain media messages?

“He must have dementia,” 
And “This is all a hoax,”

And “Other people are pulling the strings,”
And “He's a puppet,”

And, you know, whatever. My friend,
There is no Tree Octopus. It's. Not. Real.

V. Objectivity 

No matter how much we try to be unbiased 
Or neutral, we're all people. Someone—

Whether it's a company, 
Whether it's an individual—

They're gonna get kickback. Like,
They're trying to sell one lifestyle, 

One view of beauty or success, 
One dream of what we all should want to achieve.

* * *

God, there could be—there’s got to be—
Something out there that's easier than this.