This panel addresses how children’s literature might respond to our contemporary age of misinformation — an age of widespread climate denial, anti-vaccination movements, and growing populations of people who believe that the earth is flat or doubt that Covid-19 is real. Since at least the eighteenth century, children’s literature has played a key role in the production of knowledge. Didactic children’s texts explicitly grappled with the power to shape reality for child readers—to teach lessons and to establish the “truth” of religious norms, gender roles, and social hierarchies. While these concerns appear conservative in nature, aimed at stabilizing norms and maintaining the status quo, they also betray a keen awareness of the ways that truth and knowledge are not stable and must be reproduced. Instead of using children’s literature for more and better indoctrination, this panel considers the pedagogical potential of children’s literature to prepare young readers to separate truths from lies, evaluate relative veracity, and cultivate reality-based (as opposed to conspiracy-fueled) critical thinking.

In the first paper, Mandy Elizabeth Moore examines how Bible stories adapted for children can teach or suppress information literacy. In a moment where conspiracy theories, right-wing misinformation, and distrust of scientific inquiry is so often connected to the White evangelical church, these Bible stories reveal a paradoxical tension in evangelical thinking. On the one hand, a core evangelical tenet is the doctrine of biblical infallibility. On the other, the publishing industry alters Biblical tales, from picture books to pre-teen devotionals, to make content more engaging, age-appropriate, or instructive. Such a tension has the potential to promote critical thinking by making transparent for children the processes of translation, adaptation, and interpretation involved. More often, however, these works invite a conflation of modified Bible stories with “The Bible”—even though that text itself exists in multiple versions. As Moore argues, a lack of adaptation transparency in children’s Bible books risks indoctrination rather than increased literacy. In obscuring how information changes in each iteration, these books stifle the information literacy skills that would help children not only understand their own faith practices but also critically interpret conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Next, Annette Wannamaker argues that narrative literacy is as important to democracy as information literacy and that literature for young readers can help teach it. Aspiring authoritarians rely on the emotions associated with familiar narrative structures to inspire their followers. They also rely on a population unable to recognize such stories as authored constructions. The Big Lie about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, used to incite an insurrection on the US Capitol, is not a set of facts but a carefully constructed narrative. The QAnon conspiracy is also a narrative, an elaborate work of participatory online culture. These narrative structures mirror what Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture texts, popular stories like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones that spread across platforms and encourage active fan participation. Works by Jenkins and other theorists can help us to theorize narrative literacy, but Wannamaker shows how works of literature can be theory too. Focusing on works for younger readers (by M. T. Anderson, Akwaeke Emezi, Neil Gaiman, Adam Gidwitz, Philip Pullman, Jeff Smith, Shaun Tan, and Angie Thomas) she shows how they teach anti-fascist narrative literacy by revealing how political narratives work to influence populations and create paradigms.

The final paper by Gabrielle Owen contextualizes our present “post truth” moment as marking a profound shift in ways that power and knowledge operate. As Bruno Latour observed in 2018, we no longer share “a common world” in which truth, subjectivity, and institutional authority are part of a mutually understood reality. This shift has occurred because a shared culture of norms and meanings are no longer necessary for the mechanisms of power to operate effectively. Rebekah Sheldon describes it as a symptom of “somatic capitalism,” which utilizes separable, individual capacities like clicks or votes to maximize profits rather than relying on the unified subject disciplined by norms. Contrasting the first-person narrative YA fiction of the 1960s-1990s with more recent works by A.S. King, Jason Reynolds, Gabby Rivera Adam Silvera, and Andrew Smith, Owen demonstrates how nonlinear and metatextual elements have the potential to teach readers how knowledge is made. Rather than obscure the processes of knowledge production in the hopes of stabilizing or recovering a “common world,” Owen proposes we embrace this poststructuralist moment to teach young people about our ethical entanglements with each other, the earth, and the world.

The panel's three 15-to-20-minute presentations allow ample time for questions.