Teaching in a 'Post-Truth' World

As of this writing, the process of data generation is ongoing, and I’ve done little analysis beyond what is represented here. However, when I search across the three analyses exercises I’ve done, I see the data begin to coalesce around several key themes/preliminary findings:

1. Awareness of positionality. In the three interviews I have analyzed, all three participants expressed, explicitly or implicitly, a keen awareness of their own positionality and relationship to the research topic. For example, Lana 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 critical media literacy. Kelly, in reflecting on her positionality as a teacher, emphasized the difficulty of the work, the implicit expectation that teachers somehow remain “neutral,” the tension she often experiences between her beliefs and those of her students’ families, and the acknowledgement that no one and nothing is truly objective. Kimberly reflected on her personal relationship with social media and how that influences her knowledge of her students and her teaching; she also acknowledged her ambivalence when it comes to addressing complex and controversial topics such as the war in the Middle East–her sense that doing so is both important and interesting but also her feeling that she is unequipped to facilitate such discussion.
2. Tensions inherent in integrating critical media literacy. Several tensions or contradictions involved in teaching CML became apparent in the analysis of the data. To continue the thread from above, for example, Kimberly’s ambivalence highlighted a tension around addressing the kinds of difficult topics that students are engaging with on digital media. There’s a strong sense that engaging with these topics is important and necessary but also an equally strong sense that doing so is risky–that it would expose the inadequacy and/or non-neutrality of the teacher and lead to controversy and discord. I’d describe this tension as safety versus authenticity. A second, related tension is illustrated in Kelly’s comments about propaganda. She implicitly noted this tension when she talked about two parallel phenomena–teachers’ efforts to educate their students about propaganda, and the increasingly common discourse among some political and parental rights groups around teachers “brainwashing” students. It’s ironic that in attempting to help students resist propaganda, teachers are sometimes accused of propagandizing, which “leaves the kids in no man’s land.” I’d describe this tension as rooted in institutional knowledge versus family knowledge. A third tension is reflected in Lana’s story about her parents–her mom, who trusts almost everyone and believes almost everything, and her dad, who trusts almost no one and believes almost nothing. This dichotomy illustrates the challenge of teaching students to engage critically with media without promoting the knee-jerk skepticism that is so characteristic of the post-truth problem. I’d characterize this tension as extreme gullibility versus extreme skepticism.
3. Literacy as more than merely reading and writing. Finally, all three participants emphasized their commitment to literacy defined broadly–that being literate means much more than being able to read and write words in print. It involves the ability to read both “the word and the world,” as Freire famously said–to critically examine not only words, sentences, and paragraphs, but also photos, videos, memes, websites, social media posts, and the power relationships represented in those texts. Lana lamented that her own high school media literacy instruction seemed disconnected from the “real world,” and she expressed a belief that what English teachers teach is actually always media–even the print books that they’re mostly known for teaching. Kelly memorably observed that “We read everything around us: Reading is not just opening a book” and referred to digital media texts as “twenty-first century hieroglyphics.” Likewise, Kimberly positioned all kinds of texts–including music and TV shows–as potentially worthy of study, and she explicitly said that “literacy is more than reading, to me.”