Candice Benjes-Small began her career at the University of Southern California and since 2001 has worked at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. She is the head of information literacy and outreach and university coordinator of information literacy for the general education curriculum. Under her leadership, the library instruction program has been recognized as an Exemplary Information Literacy program in numerous categories by the ACRL. She has served as president of the Virginia chapter of ACRL (VLACRL) and is active on numerous VLACRL committees. She and Rebecca K. Miller founded The Innovative Library Classroom, a very popular regional information literacy conference that won the 2016 Beta Phi Mu Conference Support Award. She has written numerous publications on information literacy and was lead author on an article about cognitive development and web evaluation which was selected as a Top 20 article by the Library Instruction Round Table. She is also an instructor for the Library Juice Academy on library instruction assessment.

- Description
- Table of Contents
- About the Authors
Fake news is a problematic phrase. Does it simply mean stories that are truly fake? Does it include a story whose facts are basically true but twisted by manipulative language and fallacious reasoning? Where do memes and fabricated images fall in this definition? Is it new, or just propaganda? And yet, “fake news” is the phrase that has captured people’s attention. While librarians have justified concerns that “fake news” does not fully (or even accurately) capture the nuances of our problematic information ecosystem, it’s a phrase that resonates with and is used by others.
Teaching about Fake News adds to this ongoing conversation by helping librarians think about the topic through the lens of different disciplines and audiences, and focus on an aspect of fake news that will be compelling to a particular audience or in a specific setting. The book contains 23 chapters with full lesson plans arranged into seven themes: algorithms/altmetrics, visual literacy, media literacy, memes, business, science communication, the financial/political impact of fake news, and partnerships. Each chapter has an accompanying PowerPoint freely available in the ACRL Sandbox (sandbox.acrl.org) and findable with the tag “#fakenews”.
Fake news is a huge subject with numerous angles and perspectives. By taking a more nuanced approach, focusing on distinct aspects of fake news and tailored for specific audiences, librarians can move students toward a more critical approach to news literacy.
Introduction
Candice Benjes-Small, Carol Wittig, and Mary K. Oberlies
Chapter 1. The Net is Not Neutral: Teaching Hidden Biases in Everyday Internet Use
Liz McGlynn Bellamy and Alyssa Archer
Chapter 2. Senior Citizens, Digital Citizens: Improving Information Consumption in Older Adults
Nicole Thomas
Chapter 3. Teaching Undergraduates to Collate and Evaluate News Sources with Altmetrics
Amanda MacDonald and Rachel Miles
Chapter 4. It’s a Conspiracy! How, Why, and Where Conspiracy Theories Endure and Thrive
Sarah E. Morris
Chapter 5. Revelatory Reading: Understanding, Critiquing, and Unveiling Religious News Stories
Andy Newgren
Chapter 6. From Rooftop to Laptop: Photographic Art(ifice)
Amy Yeminne Kim
Chapter 7. What You See Is What You Get… Or Not? Fake News Through the Visual Manipulation of Data
Elizabeth M. Johns and Justine Chasmar Stauffer
Chapter 8. Evaluating Data Visualizations for Misinformation & Disinformation
Nicole Helregel
Chapter 9. The Power of Images: From Postmodern Art to Memes
Rebecca Barham
Chapter 10. The Birth of the Meme: Political Cartoons, Media, and the Election of 1800
Michael Frawley
Chapter 11. Memes are not Fact: Thinking Critically about Memes in a World of Misinformation
Rosalind Tedford and Hubert Womack
Chapter 12. Fact-Checking Viral Trends for News Writers
Elizabeth M. Downey
Chapter 13. Bad Influence: Disinformation and Ethical Considerations of Influencer Marketing Campaigns on Social Media Platforms
Laureen P. Cantwell and Mia Wells
Chapter 14. Battling Fake Science News: The Power of Framing
Ekaterina Bogomoletc and Nicholas Eng
Chapter 15. Establishing the Fake News-Pseudoscience Connection in a Workshop for Graduate Students
Brian Quinn
Chapter 16. Sound Science or Fake News? Evaluating and Interpreting Scientific Sources Using the ACRL Framework
Anna Mary Williford and Charlotte Ford
Chapter 17. How the Scientific Method Invalidates “Fake News”
Megan Carlton and Lea Leininger
Chapter 18. “Fake News,” Real Policies: How the Blurring of Information Genres May Affect the Creation of Health Care Policies
Kathleen Phillips and Joel M. Burkholder
Chapter 19. Alternative Facts and Actual Profits: Teaching Fake News in a Business Context
Allison F. Gallaspy
Chapter 20. Mediated Lives: A Cultural Studies Perspective to Discussing “Fake-News” with First-Year College Students
Jacob Herrmann
Chapter 21. Teaching Students to Analyze and Interpret Historical Propaganda
Amy E. Bush, Christine Cheng, and Alesia M. McManus
Chapter 22. Countering Fake News with Collaborative Learning: Engaging Writing Center Tutors in Information Literacy Instruction
Lori Jacobson
Chapter 23. Faculty Conversations: Bringing the Next Level of “Fake News” Library Instruction into the Classroom
Jo Angela Oehrli
About the Editors
About the Authors