Abstract
The contemporary crisis in the public’s perception of the news media is marked by both an absence of trust (when so many sources bombard us with contradictory versions of the news, how can we trust any of them?) and a surfeit of trust (many citizens trust a limited number of news sources absolutely and dismiss their competitors as fake news). This crisis demands not more trust but different, more critical kinds of trust. Instead of teaching unwary citizens to tell real news from fake news so that they place unquestioning trust in trustworthy sources, we should be teaching them how to trust all sorts of announcements and utterances more critically, not asking simply, “Is this true?” or “Is this a trustworthy source?”, but “Who is producing this news? What are they asking me to believe? What is their agenda? What other claims have they made before, and how have those claims compared to competing claims? What kinds of trust are they soliciting, and how would I like to respond?” Questions like these are less often raised in discussions of fake news than in classrooms teaching literature and cinema, for it is in thinking about fiction that students are encouraged to develop more sophisticated kinds of trust than “This is true” and “This is just made up.” This study asks how the strategies used to teach fictional literacy can serve as a basis for teaching the critical literacy we need to respond to allegedly nonfictional texts.
Presenters
Thomas LeitchUnidel Andrew B. Kirkpatrick, J. Chair in Writing, Department of English, University of Delaware, Delaware, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Fake news, Fiction, Literature, Media literacy, Trust
