This collection offers support for instructors who are concerned about students' critical literacy abilities. Attending to critical reading to help students navigate fake news, as well as other forms of disinformation and misinformation, is the job of instructors across all disciplines, but is especially important for college English instructors because students' reading problems play out in many and varied ways in students' writing. The volume includes chapters that analyze the current information landscape by examining assorted approaches to the wide-ranging types of materials available on and offline and offers strategies for teaching critical reading and writing in first-year composition and beyond. The chapters herein bring fresh perspectives on a range of issues, including ways to teach critical digital reading, ecological models that help students understand fake news, and the ethical questions that inform teaching in such a climate. With each chapter offering practical, research-based advice this collection underscores not just the importance of attending to reading, particularly in the era of fake news, but precisely how to do so.

Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America shows how postsecondary teachers can engage with the phenomenon of “post-truth.” Drawing on research from the fields of educational and cognitive psychology, human development, philosophy, and education, Ellen C. Carillo demonstrates that teaching critical reading is a strategic and targeted response to the current climate. Readers in this post-truth culture are under unprecedented pressure to interpret an overwhelming quantity of texts in many forms, including speeches, news articles, position papers, and social media posts. In response, Carillo describes pedagogical interventions designed to help students become more metacognitive about their own reading and, in turn, better equipped to respond to texts in a post-truth culture. Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America is an invaluable source of support for writing instructors striving to prepare their students to resist post-truth rhetoric and participate in an information-rich, divisive democratic society.

The Case for Critical Literacy explores the history of reading within writing studies and lays the foundation for understanding the impact of this critical, yet often untaught, skill. Every measure of students’ reading comprehension, whether digital or analog, demonstrates that between 50 and 80 percent of students are unable to capture the substance of a full discussion or evaluate material for authority, accuracy, currency, relevancy, appropriateness, and bias. This book examines how college-level instruction reached this point and provides pedagogical strategies that writing instructors and teachers can use to address the problem. Alice Horning makes the case for the importance of critical reading in the teaching of writing with intentionality and imagination, while sharing glimpses of her own personal history with reading and writing. Horning provides the context for understanding what college faculty face in their classrooms and offers a history of critical literacy that explains why, to date, it has mostly neglected or ignored the diverse statuses of students’ reading challenges. The Case for Critical Literacy explores actionable options to better meet students’ literacy needs. College and university faculty, especially writing instructors, will benefit from an understanding of what has happened in the field and what needs to change.

Winner! 2019 Divergent Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research! Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America confronts the reasons that so many Americans were susceptible to widespread media misinformation campaigns leading up to and during the 2016 Presidential Election.

How do we help college students become independent learners in their disciplines? In this collection, the editors and contributors argue that we do so by supporting students in learning from texts, which entails recognizing reading as a problem-solving process, supporting students to take responsibility for the intellectual work in their classes, and creating strong classroom communities that help students develop identities as scholars.