Education in the Age of Misinformation

This edited volume examines the implications of misinformation and youth digital life in a new information environment. This new information environment is characterized by high levels of user engagement, hidden algorithmic manipulations, and information abundance, including misinformation and disinformation. While misinformation and disinformation in the post-truth era have been previously investigated, this edited volume offers a distinctive educational focus that scholars have not yet addressed. Chapters contribute to the ongoing discussion of the role of education in democracies while uniquely contextualizing the problem of misinformation as a pedagogical opportunity. Contributions from across the globe answer the question of how education might respond to the changing information environment through engagements with educational philosophy, democracy, and everyday practices of teaching and learning. The book adds to a growing body of work exploring what it means to engage in responsive, rather than reactive or stagnant, pedagogy. 

• Misinformation
• Disinformation
• Education
• Democracy
• Pedagogy
• Media education
• Digital life
• Online education
• Youth online

“This collection strikes an excellent balance between pedagogical responses to misinformation with the broader critical analysis of education in this moment, as a profoundly epistemological challenge. Included here are reflections on educational methodology as malleable in itself to misinformation, social media’s disruptive influence on both education and democracy and the promise of media literacy education with a civic orientation. The real strength here is in how the work avoids binary solutionism through either technology itself or resistance to it. Instead, the book draws together a series of essential explorations of knowledge, evidence, information, and identity in the era of information disorder and unhealthy media ecosystems and the implications of these for teaching and learning.”
—Julian McDougall, Professor, Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University, UK

• Faculty of Education, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada

  Lana Parker

Lana Parker is Associate Professor of Language Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor, Canada. Her research examines relationality in education, with a particular focus on the intersections of literacies, ethics, and democracy. She has led nationally funded research in Canada on youth engagement with misinformation and responsive pedagogies since 2018.