Post-truth pedagogy: Principles and practices

Keyes (2004) traces the human deception most recently known as post truth to the beginnings of known recorded history, and examines its discourse. But recently, I suggest, there seem to have been three fundamental shifts in the nature of post-truth: 1) from a good con enacted on others outside our own communities (Keyes, 2004), to what opponents “couldn’t prove to be wrong,” (Gross, 2017: 2) to “gaslighting,” or the production, through language, of “outright lies, empirical falsehoods, and misleading associations…in the service of [the elite’s] own interests” (Tallis, 2016: 9). 2) from local deceits to global ones such as those Blacker (2013: 37-39) describes, including free trade, speculative finance, and the commons. 3) from socially-condemned behavior that would force the liar to resign if found out (Gross, 2017) to socially-sanctioned behavior in which our aversion to words associated with deception has declined. This has led us to the coming climate apocalypse—about which the late Stephen Hawking warned that humans may need to colonize other planets in order to survive the environmental destruction we have wrought (Barclay, 2018). Simply stated, educational institutions (meaning all of us) have failed in their/our espoused public purposes, only to be supplanted by populist knowledge which undermines scientific research on renewable processes, and alters the political discourse on the human causes of climate change and other threats to human survival (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). Such political discourses paint those who object to the status quo as “killers—of people, progress, and jobs” (Schlosberg, 2017: np). Everyday, we educators support post-truth practices by engaging in such small sacrifices of our integrity by undermining scientific research. We need to engage in a post truth pedagogy; this presentation will begin to articulate principles and practices to guide this post truth pedagogy.