Teaching Readers in Post-truth America

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.

Ellen C. Carillo is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing program coordinator at its Waterbury Campus. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition and literature, and her scholarship has been published in Rhetoric Review; The Writing Lab Newsletter; Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy; Feminist Teacher; Currents in Teaching and Learning; and several edited collections. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition, A Writer’s Guide to Mindful Reading, and Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America.