Teaching in a 'Post-Truth' World

This analysis is based on the transcript of a one-hour interview with “Lana,” a student teacher who is one of my participants and practitioner-researchers. I conducted this semi structured interview on Dec. 18, 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.

The primary method of analysis I applied was immersing myself in the data, jotting, and writing an initial analytic memo to record “first impressions, reminders for follow- up, preliminary connections, and other thinking matters about the phenomena at work” (Saldaña, 2014, p. 3). As I slowly reread the transcript, I considered what the transcript might teach me about two of my six research questions—the two that I thought this interview would be most likely to answer (Mihas, 2022): RQ 1, How do three teachers and two student teachers in three diverse contexts (rural, suburban, urban) conceptualize critical media literacy (CML) and epistemic cognition (EC) before and after participating in the project?, and RQ4, In what ways do the teachers reflect and act on their own positionality and instructional context in conceptualizing, strategizing, and implementing CME integration?. As I read, I jotted notes to myself whenever I saw one of the research questions addressed or whenever something stood out to me. For example, when I asked Lana why she participated in the study, she talked about her interest in the process of educational research. I jotted the following note: “This response surprised me; I wouldn’t have predicted it as the first motivation Lana shared for participating. But it definitely fits with what she said earlier about considering herself a lifelong learner.” I jotted 28 notes in total.

After rereading my jottings, I composed the analytic memo. Because of space constraints, I’ve selected an excerpt from that memo, which by itself was around five double-spaced pages, a little over 1,000 words.

Lana is very aware of her positionality. In this interview, she positioned herself variously as (1) a teacher, (2) a student, (3) a researcher, (4) a daughter, (5) a woman, (6) a friend. Her reflection on all of these shaped the way she conceptualized integrating CME. For example, as a teacher, she had specific ideas about how she might integrate it into each of the three units she knew she would be teaching. As a student, her experience was that it wasn’t very well integrated–there were “digital citizenship” lessons once a week, but they were standalone and taught by someone other than the classroom teacher. When she did anything media-related in her classes, it was usually on the production side and disconnected from the “real world”–e.g., creating a fake Instagram post for a fictional character. Teachers never, as far as she could recall, brought in digital media from the “real world” to analyze–probably, she though, because they were afraid of potential conflicts with parents.

The stories she told in which she positioned herself as a daughter were particularly interesting. Her parents seem to illustrate opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to engaging with information: her dad is skeptical of everything, and her mom is skeptical of nothing. Here’s how she described them:

But my dad is a total hypochondriac. And he works for the Department of Defense. And so he has always been like, kind of into conspiracy theory, like kind of just never believe anything you read. Always think for yourself, blah blah blah. And like, when I became when I got baptized in the eighth grade, he was like, you drink the Kool Aid you believe everything you hear? Which like now he is, he was right, but, but like it applied to other realms of life. So I had a lot of that going on at home from my parents, and my dad’s super liberal he, he’s like Bernie Sanders all the way like, not in the Trumpy way where it’s like, don’t get vaccinated or something like that, but in the way where it’s like, understand that everyone is trying to oppress you or whatever. So I had a lot of that going on at home, but my mom is the opposite. And she, to this day will send me the most clearly fake news from Facebook, and she’ll be like, Oh my God, did you see this beached whale in Ohio? I’m like, Mom, what are you talking about? There’s no way that is real. And so like, learning the lot of the critical or like, recognizing misinformation I … I kind of learned from the dichotomy of my parents. . . . 

It seems clear that this “dichotomy” she describes is shaping the way she’s conceptualizing this stuff–realizing that extreme gullibility and extreme skepticism are both problematic approaches to engaging with media texts. 

Writing this part of the analytic memo with RQ4 in mind helped me see Lana’s perspective on a facet of the research problem that I’m keenly interested in—I’d even say it’s at the heart of the problem: How to teach students to engage critically with media without promoting the knee-jerk skepticism that is so characteristic of the post-truth problem. Lana’s perspective on this is shaped by her positionality as the daughter of a very skeptical man and a very uncritical woman, and her parents illustrate the two extremes of the problem. Elsewhere in the interview, she noted that her students are much more likely to believe “everything is fake”—including credible texts—than they are to be fooled by misinformation. This issue has come up in my reading of the literature, and I also encountered it recently in an observation I did in Lana’s classroom, where a student’s (unfortunate) conclusion from a lesson was that “you can’t trust any media.”

I will note briefly that I applied one other analysis method to this interview after writing the analytic memo: I created several codes based on elements of the two research questions above and then deductively coded the interview; in future rounds, I plan to use thematic analysis and inductive coding in an iterative process of abduction (Bingham & Witkowsky, 2022; Braun & Clarke, 2012). None of these methods are entirely new to me; I’ve done deductive and inductive coding in the past, and I learned how to write analytic memos in EDCI 621. I will say that the idea of writing an initial analytic memo before doing any coding was new to me, but it seems like a helpful way to record first impressions of the data.

References

Bingham, A. J., & Witkowsky, P. (2021). Deductive and inductive approaches to qualitative data analysis. Analyzing and interpreting qualitative data: After the interview, 133-146.

Clarke, V., & Braun, V. (2017). Thematic analysis. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(3), 297-298.

Mihas, P. (2021). Memo writing strategies: Analyzing the parts and the whole. Analyzing and interpreting qualitative research: After the interview, 243-256.

Saldaña, J. (2014). Coding and analysis strategies.  The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199811755.013.001