Long before the Internet, blogs, and tweets made it possible for almost anyone to float any idea out to the public—true or not—Jon Scieszka wrote a book titled The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. In this book, the reader is presented with an alternative perspectiveof a series of unfortunate events involving the wolf and the three pigs. The story is told from the point of view of Alexander T. Wolf, who explains that the houses belonging to the first two pigs were blown down as a result of a sneeze (which escaped from the wolf as he stopped by to borrow a cup of sugar for the birthday cake he was baking for his dear grandmother). The reader is presented with a new perspective, one that had been previously excluded.
Three Guiding Questions
Although the inclusion of an abundance of previously excluded perspectives is a positive outgrowth of the Internet and social media, the downside of the egalitarian nature of digital texts is that anyone can say almost anything. No credentials, no fact checking, and no editorial boards are required to publish digital texts. This makes teaching students how to read informational texts with a critical eye more important than ever. One way teachers can approach this responsibility is to encourage students to use guiding questions when reading digital or any other informational texts. I teach students to use three guiding questions to step back from a text and gain a critical perspective:
- What story is being told?
- Who's telling the story?
- How would the story be different if someone else told it?
The first question encourages readers to get the gist of the piece. Readers determine the topic of the text and the message the author is conveying about that topic. A text might tell the story of inequities created by segregation in schools. Another might tell the story of the Japanese-American relocation and internment in the United States during World War II. A third might tell the story of a controversial court battle. Whatever the focus of the piece, it is the reader's job to first figure out what "story" is being told.
The second question requires many students to think in new ways because students are often unaccustomed to questioning the authority of the authors they read. As a teacher, I have to demonstrate how to think about authors' perspectives, affiliations, and qualifications. This question also extends beyond the author to include any sources the author consulted or interviewed for the piece. Readers must consider the credibility of those sources as well.
Thinking about perspectives that are left out is embedded in the third question I teach my students to ask. How would the story be different if it were told from the perspective of a person or group whose interests were very different from those presented in the piece? What sources or people were not consulted? Whose perspective is left out? Critical readers need to notice when they're only being given part of the story and understand why they're being persuaded to believe a single story.
Let the Reader Beware
One way we can prepare our students for the one-sided, inaccurate, and unfair writing they are likely to encounter is to encourage them to become critical readers who approach every text with a set of guiding questions that poke through weaknesses in the way the information is presented. Likewise, guiding questions can help the reader see the value in a text that is factual, fair, and enlightening. As Alexander T. Wolf reminds us, there is more than one way to present a set of facts and more than one perspective to consider.