To illustrate one of several aspects of the complicated personal relationship I have with my current research, I begin with an excerpt from my dissertation research journal. For context, in this entry I’m focusing on one of my kids, who also happens to be a student in an English class taught by “Kimberly,” one of the three classroom teachers participating in my study.
February 19, 2024
[I had an argument with my son that] started when [he] asked why these terms—misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation—were even necessary. His contention seemed to be that the use of these terms would be likely to confuse and scare people, and why would we want to do that when we could simply use the term “fake news,” or, even better, just talk about intentional versus unintentional lying—if that is indeed the distinction between mis- and disinformation (we didn’t talk much about malinformation, because it’s a term I haven’t heard outside of WTF, and I don’t really even remember what it means.
At one point fairly early in this conversation, he made the statement that it was all a matter of perspective. . . . It was a frustrating conversation. But eventually it became clear that (1) James was upset about [some] earlier comments about [a Trump-endorsed] political ad because he’d met the representative and been impressed, and some of his friends knew him personally, and (2) what really seemed to be behind his objections to the terms had to do with language and elitism. Here’s what I just wrote to Kimberly:
Thanks for sending [the written discussion from class on Friday]. . . . I haven’t looked at [it] yet, but based on the conversation I had with [my son] Thursday night . . . it seemed like the underlying objection might have to do with the perception that the use of these terms—misinformation, disinformation, and fake news—is somehow elitist. He didn’t use that word, but that seemed to be what he was getting at. I’d like to think he was speaking more on behalf of his friends than of himself, but there’s no doubt his beliefs and opinions have been shaped over the past few years by living and going to school in a small town.
His basic contention seemed to be, why use these terms, which could frighten and confuse people, when there are more understandable terms—fake news, or better yet, intentional or unintentional lies—available. I tried to explain the way “fake news” has been politicized and means very different things to different people, as well as the important distinction between mis and disinformation. He got it, but we still went round and round a bunch. My sense is that the resistance is less to the terms themselves than to what they are perceived to represent—yet another example of the educated class positioning itself as superior to “ordinary people”–the kind of people, I suppose, who tend to be drawn to a politician like Trump (who [my son] insisted he still believes is a dangerous demagogue—he used those words) who speaks their language and doesn’t use those kinds of terms. And certainly there’s truth in what he’s saying; the arrogance of the educated class (and of course I count myself among them) is a real problem, and many in that class do use language, intentionally or unintentionally, in ways that position themselves as superior. I know one reason a lot of people hated Obama and love Trump is one of the reasons I was drawn to Obama and am repelled by Trump: Obama speaks like a college professor, and Trump speaks like—well, like the crude, boorish, vulgar narcissist that he is.
So if you do continue the discussion, yes, it might help to contextualize it more, but it might also be interesting and worthwhile to dig into their resistance and find out more about where it’s coming from. It might also be interesting to have them do some digging on the term “fake news”–how it developed, how its meaning changed, the different meanings it has taken on over the last decade. Or to just dig further into the use of language in general—how it’s used by different kinds of people for different purposes.
I want to step back for just a moment and reflect on the uncomfortableness of all this. The argument with [my son] was interesting and unsettling, and it probably wouldn’t have happened—at least not in this way—if I hadn’t been working with Kimberly over the past year, doing research in her classroom, involving her in my work. I was the one who introduced her to “What the Fact?” a year ago, and while she might still be using it and doing some of this work if she weren’t involved in my study, I doubt she’d be doing as much. The really weird thing is that the research I’m doing seems to have established my position in the eyes of my son and his friends as a kind of elitist, and that’s very uncomfortable position for me. I always knew the school and community would likely perceive me that way, but it didn’t occur to me that my son might. I’ve put him in a pretty awkward position, living in a small town and doing research in his school. I’m glad he’s close to graduating and heading off to a big university, where hopefully he will be able to expand his thinking somewhat. Look at how elitist I sound when I say that.
My relationship to the other schools and teachers involved in my research is less personal and therefore less complicated, but it’s still worth noting that I knew all of them prior to beginning the research. I met the other two classroom teachers when I supervised student teachers in their classroom, and I wouldn’t have invited them to participate unless I’d had a high regard for them as teachers and people. The participating student teacher has been in three classes I’ve taught or helped teach, and I am currently her university supervisor (though not, I should note, the instructor of record and therefore not responsible for assigning her a grade). I’ve written several recommendation letters for her, and I feel like I know her quite well.
The fact that I am a white male, and the only male in the group (and also the leader of the project) is not lost on me. It’s not a dynamic we’ve discussed explicitly, but it is one I’ve reflected on a lot. I am particularly aware of the tendency of men to take charge, dominate discussions, interrupt women, etc., and I have tried to take pains not to do that. Sometimes that means letting recorded discussions go off-topic much longer than I’d like to.
The remainder of this post focuses on some of the background of the research, as well as my own background and current living context, that influences my relationship to this research. I have borrowed it from the “Subjectivity Statement” I wrote in Fall 2022 for EDCI 615.
Subjectivity Statement
On a late fall afternoon in 2020, after teaching my last online synchronous class of the day, I turned on National Public Radio. A reporter had produced a story on the growing problem of mis- and disinformation (MDI), with a focus on the spread of pandemic-related MDI. I listened with great interest because I had already been thinking about this issue. Development of the COVID-19 vaccines were well underway, and the anti-vax community had been posting falsehoods on social media. Several close family members had indicated to me that they believed some of this messaging and would not be getting the vaccine. The reporter was interviewing an expert on MDI, and the expert said something like this: “Without destroying the whole internet, which is probably not feasible, there is nothing we can do to fix this problem now. All we can do is try to equip young people with the tools they will need to address it in future generations.” When I heard that, I knew what my PhD research focus would be.
My Christian faith is at the core of my identity, and one of the most important values of Christianity is truth. Christians are to be people of the truth, to pursue it where it can be found, to live by it when it can be known. Over the last few years, I have watched, appalled, while people from my own “tribe” have, often because of political ideology, succumbed to MDI—about the pandemic and the vaccine, about climate change, about the 2020 election. Many of them are guilty of not only believing it but also promoting it. I believe that researching and looking for ways to address the problem of MDI is one way I can enact my faith-motivated commitment to truth.
In addition to political and ideological factors, another important factor in the spread of MDI is literacy—especially media literacy, the ability to consume and produce media critically and conscientiously. Before I became an English teacher in 2003, I spent a year and a half as a reporter for two small-town newspapers, and I learned some of the basic principles of journalism, which I passed on to many students over my teaching years while advising student newspapers. Strangely, though, my colleagues and I seldom found time to address media literacy in my English classes, even though there were standards about it—it always seemed there were more urgent or interesting topics to cover. Today’s high school students consume vast amounts of digital information, often uncritically (Smith & Parker, 2021). I want to understand how English teachers can better equip them with the tools to become critical, conscientious consumers and producers of media and to recognize and deconstruct MDI in our post-truth world (Janks, 2018). I also want to understand how to better prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) for this task.
While my interest in this research topic arises from my faith and my reporting and teaching experience, these also pose challenges and limitations. One is the challenge of epistemology. As a Christian, I believe in the existence of objective reality and truth, and as a journalist and a teacher, I believe in the pursuit of truth consistent with observable reality. To some extent, making that statement puts me at odds with the qualitative research community (Crotty, 1998), even more so with the critical approach to research and teaching that dominates the field of English education. At the same time, as I’ve written about in my forthcoming paper, those communities are also faced with a challenge in confronting some of the “post-truth” groups spreading MDI: on what grounds can we say they are wrong? If truth and reality are merely socially constructed phenomena, how can we reasonably make the claim that, say, the COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective, or that Joe Biden did in fact win the 2020 election, or that the world faces a serious threat from human-induced climate change? This is a question with which I believe the qualitative and critical research communities must wrestle.
One dynamic at work in the research I am envisioning is what some have described as a rural-urban divide. By and large, rural populations were more likely to support Donald Trump and are more likely to embrace the “big lie” about the 2020 election, as well as other MDI. Inherent in this divide is a power dynamic; rural communities have more electoral power but less influence in cultural institutions; they tend to be suspicious of the cultural “elite,” who for their part sometimes tend to look down on rural folk. My own biography to some extent spans this divide. I grew up in rural and small-town Minnesota. My parents were both registered nurses with two years of post-secondary education; my dad finished his bachelor’s degree when I was quite young. We belonged to a branch of Christianity that was quite anti-intellectual and fundamentalist in its approach to culture (a branch that in large part, decades later, has closely assigned itself with Donald Trump and right-wing populism). Its leaders were highly suspicious of the life of the mind, though fortunately my parents were not. I ultimately went to college, where I rejected those approaches (but not Christianity), and ended up in the heart of Minneapolis and later St. Paul with a Master’s degree, teaching English. Eighteen years later, when I decided to pursue a PhD, steep housing prices led us to settle in the small town in Indiana where I currently live and where my kids attend school. This is a town where Trump, “Let’s Go Brandon” and Confederate flags are not hard to find. Nevertheless, the community is much more ideologically complex than I expected it to be; for example, in June, rainbow flags lined the entire block on which my teacher neighbor lives.
Some of my dissertation research in this community, in the small junior-senior high school my children attend. In some ways, I think I bring both an insider’s and outsider’s perspective to this space. On the surface, I’m a total outsider. I moved to a red state from a blue state, to a small town from a suburb. Seventy-seven percent of voters in Fountain County, where Attica is located, voted for Donald Trump in 2020; my wife and I had one of our kids scrape the anti-Trump bumper stickers off our vehicles before moving here so our neighbors would not dismiss us outright before getting to know us. I taught in a large urban school where less than 10 percent of the population is white; Attica Jr-Sr High is a small-town school where more than 90 percent of the population is white. I am pursuing a PhD while living in a county in which only 15 percent of residents aged 25 or older have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Even if none of those things was true, I would be an outsider simply because unlike most of the people who live here, I grew up somewhere else.
On the other hand, aspects of my background give me an insider’s perspective in some ways. I grew up in rural and small-town Minnesota among political and religious conservatives. Though I tend to reject the label “evangelical Christian” and much of the political and cultural baggage it carries, I have been formed by that tradition and still find myself in a relationship with it, albeit an uneasy one. So although I really am an outsider to the culture of my small town, I have an insider’s understanding of some of the relevant aspects of it, including the white Christian nationalist language often employed in post-truth discourses. Moreover, as I mentioned, my children attend school at Attica, and given the attrition the school has seen (the student population has declined by 12% over the last five years, according to PublicSchoolReview.com, and I know anecdotally that many of these students have gone to the rival school across the river), I have a sense that the school and much of the community appreciate that we brought four “good students” (all of them are generally positive contributors to the school community and involved in sports and other extracurriculars, and two are academically gifted) to this town and sent them to the local school when we had other options.
The “insider” aspect of my relationship to this research may complicate it. After just a few weeks of observation in the school I’ve been referencing, I am already encountering what Peshkin (1988) called the “Pedagogical Meliorist I” (p. 6). Since I’m both a parent of kids who have these teachers and also a seasoned English teacher, this impulse is especially strong. However, I don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize my kids’ standing with any of their teachers. I don’t want to damage the budding friendship I have with our neighbor, who teaches science and math classes at the school and whose family we hang out with on a semi-regular basis.
References
Crotty, M. (1998). The foundations of social research: Meaning and perspective in the research process. Chapter 1: Introduction: The Research Process. (p. 1-17)
Peshkin, A. (1988). In search of subjectivity. One’s own. Educational Researcher, 17(7), 17–21.
Teaching in a 'Post-Truth' World 