„do you really beLIEVE that.“ – Positionierungen von Lehrkräften zu Verschwörungstheorien im Spannungsfeld von Epistemik, Vertextungsform und Institution

Abstract

We analyse how teachers position themselves towards conspiracy theories in teaching contexts following the methodology of conversation analysis and positioning theory. For the analysis we selected sequences in which three teachers narrate and comment retrospectively on incidents from their everyday school life in which their students confronted them with conspiracy theories. Since conspiracy theories are seen as a complex and potentially explosive phenomenon in both public and academic discourse, many see it as mandatory to take or at least express a critical stance towards them. In general, however, conspiracy theories make it difficult to take a clear position, as they are often vague and incoherent on evaluative, textual, functional and epistemic levels. These ambiguities are also reflected in the teachers’ positions as evidenced in our data: On the one hand, they emphasise the need to raising students’ awareness of how to identify conspiracy theories and how to adopt a critical stance towards them. On the other hand, the micro-analytical reconstruction of the narrative sequences of concrete classroom situations shows that the teachers do not always act in line with these beliefs. This can be interpreted as a tension between socially conforming positioning acts towards conspiracy theories on the one and the teachers‘ professional self-perception on the other hand.