Just asking questions: can a far-right president turn agentic knowledge construction into political manipulation?
| Date | 07 July 2023 |
| Pages | 197-220 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-10-2022-0118 |
| Published date | 07 July 2023 |
| Author | Renato Russo,Paulo Blikstein |
Just asking questions: can a
far-right president turn agentic
knowledge construction into
political manipulation?
Renato Russo and Paulo Blikstein
Department of Mathematics, Science and Technology,
Teachers College of Columbia University, New York, New York, USA
Abstract
Purpose –There are several connections between educationand disinformation, including the association
between years of schooling and vulnerability to unfounded hypothesizing. The purpose of this paper is to
inquire into a competing explanation: political leaders might be exploring powerful teaching and learning
strategies to disseminate agendas basedon baseless assumptions, exploiting human’s tendency to generate
robust theorieseven with incomplete or incorrect information.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors analyzed ten videos published onlineby a highly partisan
YouTube channel. The footage contained informal encounters between former Brazilian President JairB olsonaro
and supporters in front of his official residence. The team sought to answer two research questions: Do Mr
Bolsonaro’s discursive moves include activators that lead the audience to understand that they are theorizing and
reaching conclusions “on their own?”Does Mr Bolsonaro’s audience follow those clues and mention politically
motivated hoaxes and conspiracy theories in their comments? This paper draws on perspectives from the field of
educational research to investigate the mechanisms used by the president to shape public opinion.
Findings –The authors found evidence of the employmentof elements akin to classroom discourse in the
dialogues led by Mr Bolsonaro.Specifically, different types of rhetoricalquestions are present to a substantial
extent in the data subsetanalyzed for this paper.
Originality/value –This work offers an alternative perspective to analyzing disinformation. By drawing
from established literature from education research, this paper departs from facile explanations that take for
granted the lack of intelligence of the audience. Conversely, it argues that popular,if not powerful, teaching and
learning strategies might play an undesired role by shaping individuals’cognitive processes to create robust,
internally consistent theories about the world using flawed assumptions and incorrect “building blocks.”
Keywords Constructivism, Disinformation, Theory building, Learning, Classroom discourse,
Politics, Political discourse, Post-truth
Paper type Research paper
This article builds on work originally presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational
Research Association, 2022. We thank the anonymous reviewers and session chair, Dr Tanner V ea, for
their inestimable feedback on that presentation. We would like to thank Inara Sousa for her invaluable
review of our data analysis and hours of discussion that led to a historicized and more robust
interpretation of the dialogues and to Cleber Sant’Anna for his advice on the layout of dialogue charts.
Thanks also to TLTLab Writing Group members Jacob Wolf, Leah Rosenbaum, Magnus Kaspersen,
Marina Lemee, Tamar Fuhrmann and Yipu Zheng for their thorough review of early drafts of this
manuscript and continuous support in everything we write. Finally, thanks to editor Dr Rebecca Reynolds
and two anonymous reviewers, whose feedback was critical to the enrichment of this work.
Funding: This work was supported by funds made available by the Institute for Latin American
Studies (ILAS) at Columbia University and the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia
University through their Faculty-Student Collaboration Grant.
Just asking
questions
197
Received26 October 2022
Revised7 March 2023
14April 2023
19May 2023
Accepted19 May 2023
Informationand Learning
Sciences
Vol.124 No. 7/8, 2023
pp. 197-220
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2398-5348
DOI 10.1108/ILS-10-2022-0118
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2398-5348.htm
1. Introduction and background
Tyack and Cuban (1997) aptly stated that “public schools have long been a favorite way of
improving not just education but society. [...] Educational elites saw themselves as expert
social engineers who could perfect the nation by consciously directing the evolution of
society”(p. 2). In other words, they conclude that when societies are faced withchallenging
problems, a standard solution of educational elites is to prescribe “more education”on a
given topic and transfer to educationalinstitutions (chiefly public schools) the responsibility
to fix the issue. Schools’centrality as the primary locus of learning in modern Western
societies might help explainwhy, in our current disinformation crisis, many believe that the
problem, again, is lack of educationand that if we increase years or the quality of schooling,
citizens will be able to see through “fake news”and fight disinformation. Indeed, in the
“post-truth world,”researchers have pointed out that schoolsstruggle to prepare individuals
to reason adequately in epistemicallyunfriendly environments (Chinn, Barzilai and Duncan,
2021), where facts seem open to interpretation based on different political agendas and
epistemologies. While educators and scholars argue over how schools should prepare
students to deal with disinformation (McGrew et al.,2017;Barzilai and Chinn, 2020),
unwarranted claims spread as fast as ever, limiting public health responses, justifying
international aggression, and –notably in the context of this paper –influencing elections
and national public policy. ConsideringTyack’s and Cuban’s warning, it seems apt to doubt
that schools alone will fix disinformation, or that the answer to it is to find a miraculous
teaching strategy or curriculum that will, once and for all, enablestudents to see through it.
However, schools could be part of the solution, and educational research can inform the
creation of strategies to deal with disinformation, defined here as “information that is
deliberately falseor misleading”(Jack, 2017).
Our skepticism on the potential of formal education in fighting misinformation
stems from a counterintuitive premise based on data from Brazil: there is no evidence
that individuals with higher levels of education will be less susceptible to support public
figures who base their discourse on unwarranted information. On the contrary, polls
indicate that people with the most years of education are the group with the highest
support rates for Brazilian chief of State Jair Bolsonaro (Poder 360, 2022). The former
president made 6,685 distorted or fake statements in his 1459 days in office (Freitas
et al., 2022). He was also known to have had publications excluded from YouTube and
Facebook due to failure to comply with standards on misinformation (Collier, 2020).
These facts, thus, shed light on the questionable causality claim between “more”
education and less belief in disinformation.
Another factor that guides our research is that the very basis of the strategy of many
disinformation groups seemsto be, ironically, to tell people to “go and learn by themselves,”
using all sorts of publicly available materials, instead of simply delivering a prepackaged
set of facts or political messages–even using the now-famous motto “do your own research”
(DYOR). In other words, incentivizingpeople to learn by themselves (a mainstay of progressive
education) became a core procedure used by strategists of disinformation campaigns (this
point is further elaboratedin the next section).
Our third fundamental conjecture is founded on reports on how challenging it is to
convince people to change their minds about a topic after initial exposure to inaccurate
information, even when the content is blatantly false (see, for example, Pennycook et al.,
2018). Assuming this is the case, as any constructivist would perfectly understand, simply
presenting straight facts to an audience will rarely change their opinion because they are
deeply entrenched in their beliefs and (naïve) theories. That is, it is unlikely that a schooling
model that privileges instructional methods based on “exposure to facts”will be enough to
ILS
124,7/8
198
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