Addressing Post-Truth in the Classroom

By Shan Mohammed, Quinn Grundy, Jessica Bytautas

As health science educators who teach students about how broader social, political, and cultural forces shape healthcare, our research team sought to conceptualize the impact of post-truth on higher education. We characterize post-truth as a series of harmful political strategies that seed mistrust, misinformation, and ideological polarization in academic settings, thereby restricting thoughtful reflection on equity, social justice, and shared understandings. Since we continue to grapple with post-truth strategies in our classroom, including debates on which forms of knowledge are “true,” we developed a critical pedagogical framework to guide educators from multiple disciplines to contend with this issue. We argue that instructors not only need to equip learners with the ability to appraise knowledge and develop information literacy, but also to understand harmful politics of power, engage in self-reflection, and utilize higher level intellectual skills to consider new ideas and perspectives, including those they disagree with. Recent student and community-led social activism on campuses across the world have led to increased consideration on how higher education responds to the politics of truth and promotes civil dialogue and debate. We view our paper as part of a furtive and ongoing discussion about the politics of knowledge-power in the higher education sector. 

Read the TLI article here.