Literacy instruction for life online 

Today, information is both easier to access and harder to evaluate than ever before. As the philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch (2016) has argued, the internet’s influence on learning and communication has been even more profound than the invention of the printing press; he suggests that a more apt comparison would be to the invention of the written word itself:  

How do we prepare students for this new reality when many of us are struggling to understand it ourselves? As literacy educators and classroom researchers, we have, at times, felt overwhelmed by the task. Is it even possible to teach young people to be independent readers and writers at a time when anonymous web designers can and often do take deliberate steps to manipulate the public’s access to information (a process that former Google ethicist Tristan Harris, 2016, described as “hijacking” our minds)? How can we teach students to find credible sources when even the most well-respected news media, such as the New York Times, are just a few links away from an array of fake and biased sites (Albright, 2016)? And how can our democracy survive when fewer and fewer people trust the work of mainstream journalists (PEN America, 2017)? 

This is a unique moment in history, one that is filled with daunting challenges for teachers. But we also see opportunities, and we are resolved to pursue them. As Stanford University’s Sam Wineburg has argued, we’re in the midst of a “revolution,” and we have to “think hard about what the school curriculum really needs to look like in an age when we come to know the world through a screen” (Dyer, 2017).