Criticality: Fact-Checking Reality II

Pursuing literacy as criticality:

fact-checking reality

“There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.”

~ Maya Angelou

Lesson Objectives

Identity: Teacher candidates will consider how texts can be representative of our beliefs and values and how our lived experiences factor into personal connections and interpretations of text.

Skills: Teacher candidates will use Caulfield's 4 Moves and a Habit to fact-check media. They will identify the main idea of texts and consider how words and images convey these ideas.

Intellect: Teacher candidates will connect texts to Discourse communities.

Criticality: Teacher candidates will consider the role perspective plays when interpreting texts.

November 16th - the lesson

Read, Watch, & Listen

Reading Summary

Effective teachers recognize that boundaries that were once defined have now become blurred. Places like school and home blur into each other, just as online activities bleed into face-to-face interactions. And because online interaction do not allow for the same social cues as face-to-face interactions, it can be difficult to distinguish intent. Figuring out what is true and what has been spun or even completely fabricated is an ongoing challenge.

In this lesson, we examine the what reality means when interacting in online spaces and consider how this impacts understanding of our disciplines and our larger world.

This week is going to look a little different. Rather than reading about fact-checking, you are going to actively fact-check a text you identify as being related to your discipline.

To help you get started, below is the presentation we examined in class. Feel free to review the slides to refresh your memory or skip right over it!

Next, read Chapters 1-3 of Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers to refresh your memory about the four moves and a habit that can help us determine the reality behind media texts. This is the same text used in class to analyze the Antifa video, so you should be able to skim through these very short chapters to review what is meant by each move. Then, spend some time searching online for a media text that connects to your discipline and that evokes strong feelings in people or that causes you to wonder about it truthfulness. Consider online articles, tweets, social media posts as viable texts.

Return to Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers and analyze the text by choosing at least one strategy from each of the sections devoted to the four moves: "Look for Previous Work," "Go Upstream," "Read Laterally," and "Field Guide." (This one is often overlooked.) Make sure to write down all your discoveries because this will be a part of your discussion next week.

November 30th - the challenge

A Critical Representation of You

The Challenge

Your challenge is to select a text that speaks to who you are and to reflect upon what it represents about you.*

The Details

Before you begin:

Take some time to reflect upon your ideologies, sociopolitical beliefs and values. To help you dig deeply, don't simply think about these. Write them down. You can freewrite like you might in a journal, compose poetry, make a bulleted list--whatever makes the most sense to you. Allowing your ideas to escape your head and putting the words down on paper or screen lends more urgency to them and allow you to think about your ideas in ways you might not if you left them sitting in your brain.

In the moment:

As we have been exploring in the last two lessons, the ways texts represent ideas can greatly impact how others perceive people and ideas. Consider how you want to be represented in the world and select a text that introduces your ideologies, sociocultural beliefs, and/or values to the world. This text can be an image, social media text, print text, video, or any other type of text you can conceive of. The text you choose should speak to how you define your own consciousness, and should serve as an introduction of your thinking and perspective to others in the class.

Complete the challenge:

Post a link to your text on your blog. Then, compose a reflection in whatever format that you choose that shares why you selected this text to represent you. Questions to address:

Why did you select this text to help others know who you are and what you believe? How does this text connect to who you are and what you believe? How have your lived experiences factor into your personal connections and interpretations of the text? (Identity)

What are the main ideas of this text? What specific words, phrases, images, or sounds help capture these main ideas? (Skills)

Which of the Discourse communities you belong to does this text best fit within? How might you incorporate this experience into your work with your own students? (Intellect)

What beliefs do you possess that are contrary to those expressed in your selected text? How might others view this text differently? (Criticality)

Post your reflection on your blog.

Post your work by Sunday, April 18 at 11:59pm.

* Adapted from Gholdy Muhammad's Cultivating Genius, pg. 127

Lesson 1: embracing wobble