Teaching in a 'Post-Truth' World

This analysis is based on the transcript of a 35-minute interview with “Kimberly,” a teacher who is one of my participants and practitioner-researchers. I conducted this semi structured interview on Dec. 20, 2023, over Zoom, and transcribed it 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.

For this analysis, I employed affective coding methods, which, according to Saldana (2013), include emotion and values coding and aim to “tap into the inner cognitive systems of participants” (p. 105). I had some hesitation about using these methods because Kimberly is very emotionally reserved, at least with me. However, she is open about her values, attitudes, and beliefs, and it occurred to me that attending to these aspects of the interview along with any references to emotion might help me understand her experiences and motivations in a new way. As I reread the transcript, then, I looked for words and phrases that conveyed emotion as well as those that communicated attitudes, beliefs, and values—the three constructs Saldana (2013) identifies as integral to values coding. Whenever a text segment seemed to be conveying one of those things, I coded it—sometimes in vivo (e.g., “TikTok is an echo chamber”), sometimes descriptively (e.g., “ambivalence about teaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”), and sometimes categorically (e.g., “beliefs about media literacy”).

Method of Analysis: Affective coding

Why I Chose It: Although Kimberly is fairly reserved, she is open about her values, attitudes, and beliefs. I thought attending to those might help me understand her experiences and motivations in a new way.

Pros: My research questions don’t explicitly focus on the emotions, values, attitudes, and beliefs of the participants, but all those things certainly inform the data; this coding method helped bring them out from this participant in a way that I might not otherwise not have noticed.

Cons: I’m always a bit hesitant to attribute specific emotions, values, attitudes, and beliefs to people if they haven’t explicitly articulated them.

After coding the entire transcript this way, I assigned each code to one of the four constructs. Sometimes this was easy; for example, Saldana (2013) defines “value” as “the importance we attribute to oneself, another person, thing, or idea”; therefore, when Kimberly said, “I do think it’s really important for our students . . . to really be able to understand and acknowledge the impact that social media has on them,” it seemed clear that she was expressing a value. Sometimes, however, it was less clear which category a text segment belonged to. For example, when Kimberly said, “I think [media literacy] should be very purposefully and like almost naturally integrated . . . like, I do feel like I, especially in the last year-ish, I feel like I’ve been integrating it more,” was she expressing an attitude, a belief, or a value? At first, I categorized it as a belief about media literacy. However, after thinking about it more, it seemed to express something beyond mere belief; yes, she believes it to be true that media literacy should be integrated into the English curriculum, but she also added that she herself has “been integrating it more”—suggesting that this belief is important enough to her personally to act on. Distinguishing between beliefs and attitudes was also sometimes challenging. For example, when she said, “Especially when it comes to stuff like TikTok, you wouldn’t think that one video is harmful, but it can be pretty harmful,” was she expressing a belief or an attitude?  Saldana (2013) wasn’t particularly helpful here, defining belief as “part of a system that includes our values and attitudes, plus our personal knowledge, experiences, opinions, prejudices, morals, and other interpretive perceptions of the social world” (p. 111). Ultimately, I classified this and other statements like it as attitudes because they seemed less fixed, and perhaps more context-dependent, than some of the statements I classified as beliefs, such as “literacy isn’t just reading to me.”

In the end, distinguishing attitudes, beliefs, and values may not be as important as the process I employed to try to make those determinations and what I noticed and learned through the careful attention that process required. What I found helpful was to create questions that I could answer by looking at the coded data. That is, I wrote four questions, each beginning with “What did my interview with Kimberly reveal about her…” and ending with (1) attitude, (2) beliefs, (3) values, or (4) emotions. As I read through each coded text segment, I found that I could use it to answer at least one of the four questions, and I matched it to the question it best seemed to answer (see Appendix, in which each question is followed by a series of specific topics, and for each topic I constructed an answer derived from the data, followed by one or more bulleted direct quotations from Kimberly). This process gave me much more insight into the complexity and nuance of Kimberly’s thoughts and feelings than I previously had. These insights were particularly noticeable in moments where she expressed an ambivalent attitude. For example, when I asked her to define her understanding of propaganda, she brought up the Israel-Palestine conflict. She made five somewhat contradictory statements, one directly after another:

• I would love to really go into the propaganda that is out about the Israel and Palestine conflict.
• But I feel like I don’t want to touch that with a 10 foot pole right now.
• I’m on like, in the—I can briefly understand what’s going on.
• But this is a this is a history of, like, 100 years, and I don’t think I’m equipped.
• but with the Israel and Palestine conflict, I don’t, I don’t on the deeper level, so I just couldn’t touch it.

She would love to teach about it, but she doesn’t want to touch it. She can kind of understand it, but she doesn’t think she’s equipped. Her ambivalence highlights the struggle many teachers likely feel when they consider tackling the sorts of controversial topics that are often at the heart of critical media literacy pedagogy, which advocates building on students’ outside-of-school engagement with (often polarizing) real-life digital media texts. To mention one more example, I learned something about Kimberly’s values that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it: She prizes inconvenient knowledge over blissful ignorance. I saw this value emerge when she talked about a unit she taught on Fast Food Nation; her students were annoyed with her for pointing out terrible things about fast food, which they enjoyed eating: “But I’d much rather you be an educated consumer, than an ignorant consumer,” she said. “If you want to make that choice, cool. Eat fast food. But I want you to be knowledgeable of that choice. So you’re not done that just making it just because that’s good is good and cheap.”

Overall, I learned that Kimberly’s attitudes, beliefs, values, and even emotions are much more complex and nuanced than I had realized.

References

Saldana, J. (2013). Affective methods. In The coding manual for qualitative researchers, 105-115.

Appendix

1. What did my interview with Kimberly reveal about her attitudes…

About teaching on the Israel-Palestine conflict? She’s ambivalent:

• I would love to really go into the propaganda that is out about the Israel and Palestine conflict.
• But I feel like I don’t want to touch that with a 10 foot pole right now.
• I’m on like, in the—I can briefly understand what’s going on.
• But this is a this is a history of, like, 100 years, and I don’t think I’m equipped.
• but with the Israel and Palestine conflict, I don’t, I don’t on the deeper level, so I just couldn’t touch it.

About teaching on mass shootings, gun control and mental health? It’s controversial:

• Last year though, my seniors that didn’t do that also–well, last year’s seniors who were are now graduated, I had them do a synthesis project on the kind of like the overall topic of mass shootings. And the way that that people always blame mental health, and, you know, tying gun laws into it. So it’s a bit controversial.

About her students’ projects on mass shootings gun control and mental health? They were interesting and illuminating and showed maturity:

• And so seeing them do their final synthesis—synthesis paper about all of that was illuminating simply because the kids who had mental health problems that I know that have had mental health problems, that it didn’t correlate, and that students who usually are more anti mental health problems were the ones that said that it did correlate, which I found very interesting.
• But that group was certainly mature enough to handle something like that.

About students who don’t meet expectations? It shows a lack of effort:

• Um, probably the synthesis projects, not because it didn’t work, because the kids just didn’t put forth effort into it. There was one we did at the very beginning of the quarter, and most of the students, even my higher level, students just straight up failed it. So I made them revise it, and went through them, through it with them together to show them, this is what it should have been. And you just pretty much copied and pasted what you already had, and made it look pretty. So kid, and kids and effort, I think mostly.
• Effective in that moment, but then like, we just did a synthesis project over Wasted and Fast Food Nation and same kind of same pattern like this, that struggled before that, like tend to work harder, worked harder, though. But then like, most kids still failed it I had to curve it, but again, I think it’s just effort. Yeah.
• just kind of just spit out facts and didn’t actually, like discuss the effectiveness of of it. Some kids did, for sure. But lots of them didn’t

About increasing media literacy integration? It could be helpful:

• I think it would help a lot. My seniors literally just finished an entire unit about food. So we took a look at Fast Food Nation, which is a little bit outdated, because it was 2001. The fast food industry has changed a lot since then. And then we watched a documentary, Wasted, which is about the food, how food is wasted, and how it’s impacting our environment.
• Yeah, I think it would. I think it would make them think a lot of the times before they do things.

About social media, especially TikTok? It’s an entertaining but not harmless echo chamber:

• Especially when it comes to stuff like TikTok, you wouldn’t think that one video is harmful, but it can be pretty harmful.
• there’s just a lot of crap on TikTok, I guess, both in the way that some creators and influencers, you know, use their children to gain followers.
• Last summer, I think of a TikTok psychic, saying that the Idaho murders were this random professor, and she made like 20 or 30 videos about it. And people believed her because she’s a psychic. And so that, you know, teacher eventually ended up suing her for defamation.
• But I think for these kids, especially I think it’s even more important. That some of them really do get swept up by the nefarious parts of media.
• Because I mean, it’s an echo chamber. So my TikTok specifically is teachers, animal lovers. Sometimes for crime. I am a true crime buff. But so the kids that are into sports are probably going to have a lot of sports TikToks So the kids are already kind of going into TikTok.. And the algorithm is just outputting exactly what they want to see. And now recently, I haven’t been on TikTok much recently, because it’s just constant ads. Every two videos, it’s now an ad.
• But like, again, I think when you’re talking about something serious, that’s serious on the surface, like global warming, fast food, how employees are treated in fast food, I think that’s one thing, but then taking it to TikTok which is really supposed to be for entertainment and supposed to be funny. Videos and stuff. I don’t I don’t think that they would think to do that because it’s supposed to be funny.
• I think they see it mostly as entertainment.

About this generation of students? They tend not to think before acting:

• And I think specifically for this generation, for some reason, sometimes they don’t always think before they do. But maybe this is the whole like, “my generation didn’t do that” talk.

2. What did my interview with Kimberly reveal about her beliefs…

About media literacy? It positions all texts as purposeful and worthy of study:

• Media literacy is kind of the fact that every piece of writing or art almost in a way is literature and its purpose is one of a few things.
• Critical media literacy would be the aspect of understanding that every piece of literature whether it’s a video or not has a point whether it’s to entertain us whether it’s to make money, whether it’s to sell us something, whether it’s to make sure we tweet something out…

About misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda? Misinformation is accidental; disinformation is purposeful; propaganda is targeted at large populations:

• Misinformation is information that is just wrong. You know, mostly usually done accidentally, like one person says it, then it continues down that road of kind of like a game of telephone, and sometimes it’s more sometimes it’s just wrong from the very beginning. And it’s done accidentally.
• Disinformation will be done for again, a purpose. So we’re seeing a lot of disinformation coming out of coming out of my gosh, Israel and Palestine right now. We’re getting it a lot up. a lot out of Russia as well with their invasion of Ukraine. It’s it’s too, it’s that propaganda.
• Propaganda is literacy created it to make a like a mass population believe your side of the story? Or to think of in your way?

About literacy and reading? Literacy is about much more than just reading:

• So yeah, I try to do that as much as possible, too, because no, kids don’t like reading. But literacy isn’t just reading to me.
• Reading isn’t just literacy to me? Um, I think literacy, again, is understanding the idea that writers for TV shows have to write, they still use the same things that authors would do. But they’re doing it a little bit differently. Same with I mean, I always say that, like songwriters. Like actual songwriters not like some of the music that we hear nowadays, but good songwriters usually use figurative language, usually there’s a point to the song. And then you tie in that to like the visual of the music video, and how those connect or sometimes at some points don’t connect. I haven’t gotten to do that unit with the current seniors yet though.

About bias? Everyone and everything is biased:

• Because every, because everything has a bias. Every written every spoken communication has a bias, is biased in some way. Right. So even if I’m talking to our sped teacher about a specific student, we both have our biases about that student.
• So even if it’s spoken language, we are still coming into that discussion with our preconceived notions about that kid.

About media? All media is the product of collaboration:

• So whether it is one individual creating a Tik Tok video, it is probably still co-constructed because they have their opinions about the topic that came from somewhere else and it’s just a long bubble or a long, you know.

3. What did my interview with Kimberly reveal about her values…

Regarding media literacy? It’s important for ELA teachers to integrate naturally it into their curriculum:

• I think it should be very purposefully and like almost naturally integrated. Like, I do feel like I, especially in the last year-ish, I feel like I’ve been integrating it more.
• Um, I, again, I feel like I do it a lot.
• I think, again, it’s just kind of naturally going to happen as we continue to, as I continue to teach and revamp my stuff every year.

Regarding education? Inconvenient knowledge is better than blissful ignorance:

• But I’d much rather you be an educated consumer, than an ignorant consumer. If you want to make that choice, cool. Eat fast food. But I want you to be knowledgeable of that choice. So you’re not done that just making it just because that’s good is good and cheap.

Regarding social media? It’s important to understand its impact:

• I do think it’s really important for our students, not just my specific students, I work with an Attica, but all around to really be able to understand and acknowledge the impact that social media has on them. But I think for these kids, especially I think it’s even more important. That some of them really do get swept up by the nefarious parts of media.
• So that’s a cultural, you know, creation and it still impacts culture today. So TikTok, a 10 second TikTok could do that too.

4. What did my interview with Kimberly reveal about her or others’ emotions…

Regarding her media literacy instruction? She hopes students apply it to their “real lives”:

• I’m hoping they have done it more. Because I’ve definitely, like discussed it with them. And I do think from the projects that had a little bit more effort, I do think some kids are looking at how they can you know, maybe waste food less, which if I can get one kid to think about it just a little bit then I think I did my—my job a little bit there.

Regarding learning inconvenient truths? Her students were mad at her, and she was understanding:

• And I—the kids got mad at me when reading Fast Food Nation because they’re like, I didn’t want to know this about fast food. I don’t want to know what was in my—like, Hey, I get that.