Calling out ‘alternative facts’: curriculum to develop students’ capacity to engage critically with contradictory sources

ABSTRACT

Information discernment has become a much needed twenty-first century skill and an essential outcome for university education. Technology has enabled more organisations to gain access to effective mass media to disseminate both accurate information and disinformation. As information sources have proliferated, information users are confronted by a plethora of superficially credible, contradictory ‘facts’ and opinions. A curriculum redesign project at an Australian university provided an opportunity to embed information discernment into a first-year unit, and to strengthen students’ capacity to engage critically with contradictory sources and competing worldviews. The review found that: (1) it was necessary to explain the importance of information discernment, (2) a restriction of information sources was helpful to the initial development of discernment, (3) the purposes of (university) education required explicit discussion, (4) it was useful to discuss the relationship between research and personal experience, and (5) later modules must consolidate and extend information literacy learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Information literacy
• information discernment
• propaganda
• teaching and learning
• Threshold Concepts
• youth work

Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank Miriam Rose Brooker for her editorial assistance with this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Trudi Cooper http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4758-5881

Additional information

Funding

The curriculum renewal project for Australian Youth Work Education was supported by the Office for Learning and Teaching (formerly Australian Learning and Teaching Council) in Australia, under [grant number PP10-1612] and implementation was funded by Edith Cowan University under the Strategic Initiative Fund, 2014. The views in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Government Department of Education and Training or Edith Cowan University.