One of the biggest components of the Watson article is the idea that we, as readers, have to address the biases that go into any kind of news reporting. There are so many different factors that shape the news that we end up reading in papers, online, and even in our twitter feeds. There is nothing,according to Watson, that has not been edited.
As a teacher of texts, in any field, not just ELA, we have to teach our students to think critically and understand every text as a creation by an author with an agenda. No text is an absolute truth. By stating this, and putting this into practice, we can teach students to read anything critically. They will deconstruct texts from Shakespeare to Buzzfeed. They will think about what biases and events have influenced an author and therefore the text. The goal is to then make them critical of their own writing. Instead of just writing whatever they think about, they take the time to evaluate how their readers may interpret what their saying and how they can write to get across the message they intend.
One of the things I did not like about the classroom that was in the pinwheel video was that the students were able to say things like "maybe he was just some weird guy". That is not helpful to a discussion. I feel that by requiring the use of textual evidence (like in my high school AP Lit), students would be steered towards the relationship between the text and outside forces, not just random comments. I bring this up because defining a culture of background knowledge, understanding the author and other driving forces inherently leads to evidence based reasoning.
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