Leaving the Mess: Epistemology and Ethics in Media Literacy Instruction

Abstract

“Authority is constructed and contextual.” Thus spake the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy (2016), an assertion that rightly guides information and media literacy instructors as we form and inform students, empowering them to navigate an ecosystem rife with mis- and disinformation. Yet as danah boyd famously argues in her 2018 SXSW EDU keynote, how we teach media literacy can become an “assertion of authority over epistemology” that undermines skills we intend to sharpen by not recognizing and valuing fundamental differences among how individuals within communities make sense of the world(s) we inhabit. Just as authority is constructed and contextual, so also are evaluation and interpretation, sense-making constructs that determine how, why, and where we consume and create information. boyd asks, “How do we teach across epistemologies?” At COIL 2023, Kimberly Cannon and Chris Rosser engage boyd and her critics to describe the mess of epistemology and ethics in media literacy instruction; we then suggest how instructors might leave the mess, offering strategies to promote community and trust deployed in an exemplar gamified media literacy course entitled Eat, Play, Love: Adventures in the Information Ecosystem. Participants will: 1) identify current challenges for media literacy instruction; 2) encounter gameful design as a pedagogical strategy for navigating challenges; and 3) be challenged to attend to how we think about and encounter other minds, whether mediated digitally or face to face. We believe our use of media and of devices that mediate a tethering of self to a world of others can initiate among us generative orientations necessary for human (well) being, even across epistemologies. Note: danah boyd does not capitalize her name, and we defer here to her preferences.