Lying in Politics: Fake News,Alternative Facts,and the Challenges for Deliberative Civics Education

Inspired by Orwell's chilling account of brainwashing, propaganda, and the obliteration of the lines between fiction and truth, Mordechai Gordon attempts to make sense of the phenomenon of lying in politics as a challenge to deliberative civics education. His analysis begins with a detailed consideration of the distinctions Hannah Arendt draws between factual truth, lying, and opinions in several works but with particular reference to her essays “Lying in Politics” and “Truth and Politics.” Gordon shows that although Arendt recognized many of the dangers to the vitality of a democracy when the lines that distinguish between facts, lies, and opinions become blurred, she could not have anticipated the extent to which the advent of modern technology and online media would exacerbate this problem in contemporary society. Next, he draws on the theory of deliberative democracy to argue that the lack of a clear distinction between fiction and factual truths serves to undermine the quality of political debates in a democratic society. In the final part of the essay, Gordon discusses the challenges that the advent of fake news organizations and the dissemination of alternative facts as truth pose to deliberative civics education, specifically how the trend of a diminishing space of truth and fact undermines efforts to teach students how to engage effectively and productively in democratic deliberations.     

Swapping documents and terms

Experiments were conducted to explore the impact of combining various components of eight leading information retrieval systems. Each system demonstrated improved effectiveness through the use of blind feedback, also known as pseudo-relevance feedback, a form of query expansion. Blind feedback uses the results of a preliminary retrieval step to augment the efficacy of a secondary retrieval step. The hybrid combination of primary and secondary retrieval steps from different systems in a number of cases yielded better effectiveness than either of the constituent systems alone. This positive combining effect was observed when entire documents were passed between the two retrieval steps, but not when only the expansion terms were passed. Several combinations of primary and secondary retrieval steps were fused using the CombMNZ algorithm; all yielded significant effectiveness improvement over the individual systems, with the best yielding an improvement of 13% (p = 10⁻⁶) over the best individual system and an improvement of 4% (p = 10⁻⁵) over a simple fusion of the eight systems.     

‘The learning sticks’: reflections on a case study of role-playing for sustainability

Use of role-plays to develop deep student-learning has many advocates. Role-play is a powerful approach for learning that develops relevant skills in a range of disciplines and situations. In Higher Education, sustainability programmes role-play pedagogy appears to have great relevance for developing the competencies that these graduates will need. The ability of role-play pedagogy to develop these competencies was assessed through a case study of students in a first-year subject/course at an Australian university. Analysis of the students’ written comments indicate that the students were involved in significant learning, and had made substantial progress in developing five key skills for sustainability. The enjoyment and engagement they demonstrated was an added benefit of their experience and potentially of the role-play approach. While it is acknowledged that a role-play requires careful planning and support, and may be considered resource intensive, it can be argued that the student learning achieved is worth the effort.     

A Theory of Practice: Hermeneutical Understanding

Arguments about learning commonly toss the buck back and forth between theory and practice, the pure and applied, the objective and subjective. Most such arguments have tried to find a reliable technical method to explain how we learn. Hermeneutics, with its roots both in sixteenth century theory of linguistic interpretation and modem phenomenological approaches to meaning, denies the claims of method ‐ rationalist or empiricist. It proposes instead to clarify the conditions in which practical understanding can take place. Unlike other approaches to learning, hermeneutics makes human language the core. It is in language that what I call in this paper the four major quadrants of understanding are realised. First, understanding is structured historically in the traditions, prejudices and institutional practices that come down to us. Secondly, understanding depends upon trying to find the unity in all the conditions that pertain to learning, in reconciling the whole with its parts. Third, hermeneutics reconceptualises the nature of practical application to emphasise the constitutive part played by individuals in modifying what is learned, such that to understand is to change as a person. Finally, understanding arises not from a solipsistic encounter between learner and material; it takes the form of a dialogue between a student and all those “others” who constitute the world of learning. In sum, both “cognitive” and “student‐centred” approaches to learning are transcended and fused in a wider horizon of understanding.