• Mandi Goodsett, Cleveland State UniversityFollow

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0477-2828

Article

5-2026

In the Library with the Lead Pipe

Academic librarians and others often engage with media literacy instruction by promoting fact-checking strategies, such as lateral reading or Mike Caulfield’s SIFT. Evidence shows that these strategies are valuable and can be effective, but they all ultimately rely on individual students to use willpower to overcome cognitive habits, biases, strong parasocial relationships with content creators, the power of algorithms, and other challenges to fact-checking content in the moment. This paper offers an alternative approach that instead encourages librarians to support students in intentionally redesigning their information environments to improve the quality of information that they encounter in the first place.

Goodsett, Mandi, "Moving Beyond Willpower: A New Direction for Media Literacy Instruction" (2026). Michael Schwartz Library Publications. 192.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_facpub/192

Goodsett, M. Moving beyond willpower: A new direction for media literacy instruction. In the Library with the Lead Pipe, May 2026. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2026/moving-beyond-willpower/

Publisher's PDF

This work, published in In the Library with the Lead Pipe, by Mandi Goodsett, is published under a CC BY 2.0 license.

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