“Controlling borders – not vaccination status”: Teaching about “Fake news” and Human Rights across the Curriculum.

Abstract

In this chapter, we present research based on the empirical analysis of “fake news” (“FN”), which is aimed at discussing its pedagogical strengths when used as classroom resources. We focus on “FN” related to COVID-19 and migrants. Our project aims at combating, first, the spread of disinformation and misinformation on COVID-19, which causes harm to public health, and, second, the proliferation of othering and hate discourse in media outlets, which is detrimental to human rights. Understanding schools as capacity-building structures, we claim that pedagogical practices based on a content, discursive, and multimedia analysis of “FN” can strengthen the development of media and information literacy (MIL) across the curriculum. After a literature review, we present the most common discursive and multimodal strategies used to establish a misleading connection between migrants and COVID-19 and provoke negative emotional reactions in the audience. Thereafter, we discuss how to turn these findings into pedagogical approaches with the potential to go beyond the identification of “FN” characteristics and linguistic deconstruction to embrace more holistic perspectives based on critical discourse and multimodal analysis.