Critical Approaches to Media Literacy in Teacher Education: Accounting for the Challenges of Post-Truth Politics

Over the last decade, digital platforms have served as vectors for the spread of false information about election results, climate change, the pandemic, and racial justice. In today's post-truth digital environment, the tools proffered by critical media literacy are commonly co-opted for divisive, profit-motivated, or hateful purposes, resulting in myriad forms of symbolic and literal violence. Teachers and teacher educators face the challenge of designing curricula and facilitating learning in a digital information landscape that is radically transformed from the one in which they came to conceptualize meaning-making. In this Voices from the Field essay, two teacher educators detail pedagogies for critically addressing this digital environment within literacy teacher education classrooms. They focus on education related to internet ecosystems, new roles for readers online, and the increased importance of emotions within online reading events as central beginnings for discussing critical digital media literacy with in-service and preservice teachers.