
Teaching in a Post-Truth Era
The English classroom has become a challenging one to lead in this age. Not only are we teachers needing to instruct our students in the specifics of standard university English concepts and requirements, but we must also now combat "post-truth". To do this, we must first understand what "post-truth" is and how it effects the books, articles, and videos our students are sifting through to find information on any given topic. It is imperative that we begin teaching students critical thinking to decipher what news is ethical and what is fake, while combatting implicit biases when choosing what to write in essays and projects. Based off a project-based learning course in journalism as described in Yonty Friesem's article "Teaching Truth, Lies, and Accuracy in the Digital Age: Media Literacy as Project-Based Learning" (2019), we have created a short series of lesson plans for English teachers that can be incorporated into a quarter system for colleges and universities. First, however, we conducted research on the topic to find effective ways to teach post-truth literacy with the help of digital tools. Not only did we find the tools, but we also discovered the issues of post-truth, fake news, and biases in the classroom, which can be found on our research page.