Critical Thinking & Consumer Awareness: A Deep Dive into Research Skills | Ep. 91

TD Flenaugh discusses the importance of researching issues that matter personally and sharing these methods with children to foster critical thinking and informed decision-making. She highlights the dangers of synthetic braiding hair, citing a Consumer Reports investigation that found carcinogens in all 10 synthetic hair products tested. Flenaugh emphasizes the need to evaluate source credibility, avoid sponsored content, and cross-verify information from multiple sources. Flenaugh also stresses the importance of building lifelong research skills and applying critical thinking to make informed choices.

Transcript

TD Flenaugh: 0:00

Okay, welcome to the falling for learning podcast. This is episode 91 So today, what we're going to discuss is actually researching like, what can we do to research issues and matters that make sense to us, that are important to us, and sharing, sharing those methods with our kids so that they be can become, you know, readers and writers who have agency and the ability to critically choose the things that they want to buy for their own purposes, making choices that involve their health, that are informed and that are going to be to their benefit. So this is a research guide, but this is also some little selfish stuff too, right? Stay tuned. Hi. Thank you so much for joining the Falling for Learning Podcast. We have this podcast to help parents and caregivers with having the resources, strategies and tools needed to make sure that their children are on track for learning and to stay on track for success. Okay, Episode 91 let's get into it now. I don't know if you know, but I have been wearing braids, braid extensions for many, many years in my life. Have them in right now. They're twisted this time. Anyway. So I started seeing news reports about all of the dangers associated with this type of hair, and I needed to actually investigate it for myself. Okay, so in addition to talking about the research methods, we're going to be discussing, you know, the credibility of sources, analyzing sources, and all of that. And again, the job for you, parents, educators, kids who are watching you need to be transferring these tech, these methods, to your own research, topics that are interesting to you, that ignite your passion, that really are issues that you're facing, decisions that you need to make in your own life. Okay, so this is my topic, but I am not advocating for you to go for this topic. I am 100% advocating that you go for the topic of your choice. Okay, so here we go. This is a news report that clued me into the consumer report investigation about synthetic braiding hair, okay, and the dangers of it. So after watching this news report, I wanted to read this consumer report investigation and do my own information as well, my own deep dive into the situation. So this is very key, that you are finding sources. And this is why this is a reputable source. This is a news report from the from the news. It is a balanced news source. Of course, humans are not unbiased. Humans are biased. But it's a balanced news source, okay, it was reporting about a particular research paper that came out from Consumer Reports, it gave us where they got the information from, and I could go and read it myself. So when we're talking about sources, means to talk about reputable sources. Is this source reputable? Right? And how do you know if something's reputable or not? Very clear. They have some skin in the game. Skin in the game comes in the form of their reputation. If they're reporting negative things, not just negative, sorry, inaccurate things and things that are not true, they can definitely be put in the situation where they are discredited and people would stop watching them, they have something to lose. That is what skin in the game is. They also could lose money from sponsors. People do not want to advertise or pay for a commercial to be ran on a website, a news source that is not reputable, that is making up things, right, that has a bad reputation because they're untrustworthy. Obviously no one wants to hear from them. Let's do the next thing. So I first was looking into understanding synthetic hair composition, right? So it is plastic based material. My husband was like, uh duh, which I thought was, What do you mean, duh, right? So the duh part he was saying, Well, of course it has carcinogen, carcinogens. Now for those of you don't know. Carcinogens, okay, the report got into carcinogens. Carcinogens are cancer causing agents they cause. They're known to cause cancer, right? So my husband was like, Duh, because it's made of plastic. And actually, I have been wearing, you know, synthetic braid hair for so long I actually never thought about what it's made of, and didn't worry about it because I've been using it since I was a little kid. It's something I didn't question in my life. And so that's again, about becoming educated, starting to question your environment, things around you, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense? What are practices that we do that are healing? What are practices that we do that we need to disrupt? Okay? So this is why we learn to read and write, not just to get a grade from a teacher, but so that we could have our own liberation, that we can have our own authentic and original thought processes, okay, and have the tools and skills to do so. So we know now that you know which I wasn't paying attention to, was even concerned about, wasn't even thinking about that. There's chemical treatments that are on this plastic type of hair, and they add it for shine, different textures, and even for heat resistance, some hidden dangers are that the carcinogens can be absorbed into your scalp. They could even be inhaled. And in addition to that, when you dip braids, which these braids aren't dip that I'm wearing with the twist, but even dipping it into boiling hot water can help to even activate it further, or to release those toxins into the air. So lots of issues right now. I personally have not had an issue where, or at least, I haven't noticed an issue, haven't taken note of an issue where my scalp was having major problems, or anything like that. So I don't know, but I know if it's a carcinogen, that's something you're not even really seeing or touching until maybe it's developed in your body. So it's something that we really have to be careful with. Now let me take a step back. Okay, this started with a just a very regular Google search, right? Consumer Reports investigation on synthetic hair, and this is when I was able to find information. I want to bring you know attention to the first part here, you see that this says sponsored. There's also things that come up now that are AI, right? It just AI generates an answer for me. Usually, when I'm on my phone, AI generates it. Here's the problem, sponsored content is paid content, right? It's paid. Paid means that it has some bias. They're trying to make money off of it. So you need to be careful. Now notice that this source is actual, the Consumer reports.org itself. So you kind of have to take that with a grain of salt and notice that I did go to the Consumer Reports myself, but that is not the only place that I went to find information about this. So it's important for you to look at your sources, see if it's sponsored, and then you need to scroll down to get to things that are not sponsored. Is it a YouTube video? Just by a random YouTube person? Now I'm kind of a random YouTube person in some ways, however, I come with a resume, right? I'm letting you know that I am a career educator. I have a master's in writing and Professional Writing, so I can give you information about writing. I have expertise in writing. I'm a national board certified teacher, so I come with receipts, baby. Anyway, you don't always know who you're talking to or who's talking to you when you're talking about YouTube or something like that. Okay, um, so even though they may be monetized or whatever it just might be, their audience is okay with the foolishness. So again, you have to be careful about who you are listening to when it comes to YouTube and all of that. Do they have receipts, or do they have some reputation, some expertise in that area? Are they just someone who talks loud and a lot of times people, and so many people are loud and wrong? Right is that it they're just loud and wrong. If that's the case, you need to know. So here we go the FDA. So here's the consumer report. I clicked on it, I found that there's a petition that you could sign again. Research into action. We're not researching just for researching sake and parents, especially home school parents out there. Care educators out there try to get your kids, your students, to be researching for a purpose, for x, for action in their lives. What are they going to how are they going to apply this their community to their own personal lives? For me, this research is going into my own personal life. I'm going to make a decision about having synthetic hair, wearing my own natural hair, I've got to make a different decision, right? I got to find out what I can do. And so I'm taking you through this process so that you could also think about what is in your life that you need to research. Right? I'm going to keep bringing that up because this is about you using your education for liberation, right, not just education for education sake. Now, if you're very just curious about something great, but if it's just something that the kids are not interested in, that you're just giving out research topics and they're not into it, this is the problem. Get them into something they're interested in. Okay? So going beyond the basic searches, you're going to start with some basic inquiries that Google search, right? Synthetic hair, synthetic braiding, hair, safety, all of this right to kind of get what you have. Then you got to get beyond those top results. Those top results are going to be sponsored, and it'll say sponsored next to it, thankfully. But of course, looking at various sources and that have the similar information has similar information, very important. If you've gone through and you find one place that has totally different information than other places, you may have some false information, right? Because sometimes there is misinformation out there, and we know things go viral, and then you go back and fact check and find out that was a totally wrong viral thing. Now not everybody gets to the end where there it gets fact checked and debunked, and they're just around there saying what this thing is that was totally wrong. The rewrite method and the rewrite method workbook are your go to resource for helping kids to learn to fall in love with writing. It has the tips, tools, resources, strategies and skill building activities to help kids fall out of writing and into loving to write. Get your book set today. You okay, again, so make sure you cross verify the information, see that it's reputable, that it's not just sponsored or biased information, and that you could find it in multiple places. Okay, effective research requires patience and critical thinking. Some things just don't make sense, but we're just sitting here agreeing with it. So again, a lot of goes into it. So let's get more into how you evaluate source credibility. Now, there are some scientific journals and studies. Those are at the top, they're peer reviewed, they have rigorous methodology. They're connected to a university with high esteem and a good, solid reputation. That's the top of it. So established news and consumer organizations are at the top. We have Consumer Reports. We have major news outlets with fact checking, so we know there's some credibility. There is believable. Is solid, we can trust it. So third tier, we're thinking about educational and government sources, university publications, the FDA, right? That's the Federal Drug Administration, the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, these different guidelines that the government puts out depending on your political ideology you might now, or in the past, have been looking at some of the government information in a different way, in a different lens. Now, we know America for sure. The basis of it is consumerism, right? So take a take a moment to think about that. Think about if information is kept secret or whatever. So again, be critical. Don't just believe everything that you read. Again, cross reference, your choice. Your cross reference, your choice, your your sources. Okay, sources. What I'm trying to say, then there's industry sources. Now let me give you a little step further. You want to look at the industries in the United States, then you want to go a step further, because let me just tell you that. In other countries, they have different guidelines than we do, and sometimes that consumerism beats out, and sometimes the industry is being financed by someone, right? So you've heard of the Philip Morris situation with the smoking and the cigarettes, when they put that stuff that some of that research was being funded by the actual cigarette companies, and certain stuff didn't come out the way it was opposed to. So again, look at other countries too to see if they're saying something else. Because sometimes other countries are more, could be less or more protective of their members of society. So say that is what it is you kind of have to take that. You have to find out for yourself, do your research. So social media and video content is just at the lowest level, right? Because anyone can pick up a camera, can start a YouTube channel, and they may not have any any way that they should be talking about this topic. They may not know anything. They might just be going over off a gut idea, or what they've heard of, or how they've always heard it, and it's not grounded in anything in, you know, specifically. So really lowest level, you have to really take it for a grain of salt. You really have to verify those resources, see if it makes any sense. See if they're referencing any resources that have a higher level of authority and, you know, reputation, okay, so really important evaluate those sources. Let's take a look at some of the Consumer Reports investigation and key findings. So this was a comprehensive consumer report that they in which they tested multiple synthetic braiding hair products, they found carcinogens in 100% every single one of the 10 that they tested okay. Everything had it. And in addition to that, there are no labels, besides it's saying something like connect the line on it. There's really no labels. You don't know what is in it, and they don't have to tell you. It's not like our food that has specific labels on there about what the ingredients are. So again, without transparency, it's hard to be healthy, not hard to be healthy. Is not healthy. Let's just say it's not healthy. If it was, you know, it's not healthy. And so that's what the final conclusion I came to, that is not healthy. It's not something I should be having in my hair, but I've been using it for years. So let's get into what those details are. It can contain carcinogens, which are cancer causing. Agents, high voc levels now voc, I will link in the comments, in the in the summary, like, what that state like another video that had information about this, but basically some more harmful stuff. All this is that's here in this list, flame retardants, harmful. Flat plates are present. More harmful stuff. All these things here are harmful, but just to you know, again, going back to the top, the cancer causing agent, which is known as a carcinogen, all of them had it in there, but a high percentage of these other things were found in it. And again, we don't know what else these are, the things they test it for. We don't even know everything that was in it. So it's very important for us to know this number one, you know, bottom line, harmful, harmful, harmful, harmful. Again, it's harmful. So I just need to choose a different style so common research pitfalls to avoid. Getting back to the thing, which is, how do you do some research? And how can you make sure that you are avoiding some research pitfalls? So relying on top search results only, which, if you're really being honest with yourself. A lot of us do we do a quick Google search, we look at the top thing and be like, See, told you so, or whatever it is. And again, you need to dig a little deeper, because a lot of times it's sponsored, accepting unverified social media claims. So someone that you like on social media, you're following them, you like them, you know them, you trust them. But are they trustworthy? That part we don't know. That part you're not sure of you don't know. So you have to actually figure that out. So then accepting unverified social media claims you know can be very harmful. You're making decisions based on someone that you think is cool, but they don't really have any expertise in the. Area. They're not a professional in the area. They're just given their opinion. Then there's confirmation bias. If I already believe that this is the best thing for my hair to wear these and I find someone who says, Oh, please, everything is they say is a carcinogen. I might as well what we gonna, you know, put ourselves in a bubble and like that confirms what I want. I'm gonna keep wearing this hairstyle. It's easy. I'm good, so be careful that you're not just listening to things you want to hear instead of listening to what you should be hearing. Right? So then superficial reading, like sometimes we skim a headline I saw on a headline, and I have 100% been guilty of this, I tell my husband I saw the headline where it said and I did not read that article. Sometimes it's just click bait, and it could have been totally from an unworthy website for me to be talking about what that news with that headline was. So just reading a headline or the first paragraph or something does not mean that you have done some research. It does not mean any of that. So how do we take action again? I already told you I'm gonna change my hairstyle. I'm not gonna put this stuff in my hair. No more, because only reason, only thing I decided to do is like the human hair. Now I do want to say and I'm gonna put it in the again, that link to the video with a group of black women talking about this, about different alternatives that you could wear, like for more health, healthy, synthetic hair, whatever. I'll probably have, like human hair. I ordered some right? So have some twists with the human hair, whatever. But eventually, just having nobody else's hair in my head is very important to me to get that together. Okay. Um, so, doing multiple research, I even tried with this hair I like, cleaned it with apple cider vinegar, you know. But again, as I did my research, if the basis of what it's made from synthetic fibers that have all these chemicals in it, just washing it with something is not going to work when it actually the what it's made from, is the problem, not what is coating the hairs? Okay? So it doesn't make any sense. So changing your buying habits, signing petitions to get things to happen differently, and then sharing the information with everyone. So I'm telling you the research that I found or what I'm going to do differently. You got to make a choice for yourself about what you want to do, especially if some of you are from families with you know, let's just say an epidemic of cancer in your family. There are some families out there, so be careful. And so again, the reason why I went through this is because we could talk about building lifelong research skills, applying our critical thinking, developing our source literacy. That I'm not just believing it because it's written down, and I hear kids and people say all the time, I saw it on the internet. We don't know which website, we don't know which personality that was on the internet that we heard, where we got that from, but because it was in writing somewhere, it must be true, is such a problem that people have gone through in their lives and then practice information synthesis again, getting it from multiple sources, and verifying your sources and actually talking to hear what other people, from another point of view, have to say, so that you can just open your mind and make informed decisions for yourself. Okay, I feel healthy today. I'm gonna be doing some, you know, getting some health checkups and everything. But I have been having skin problems. I've been having skin problems before I was using I would just have my own hair and so I can't say that it was because of that, but I'm sure it didn't help once I put it in so again, and I just put it on because I'm really working on my book. I'm right now at a doing a teacher research right now. I'm a teacher consultant with the UCLA writing project, and I'm doing research today, and I'm on the campus of San Jose State University, and I will be putting some more pictures on the ground of what I'm doing today, and then interviewing other teacher consultants that I work with as well. But again, you know, make sure you are doing something today that your future children will thank you for But really most importantly, gives you a competitive advantage. You're doing things that are going to give your child a competitive advantage by listening to the falling for learning podcast and putting that research into action. Enjoy your Saturday. Thanks again for supporting the falling for learning podcast. As new episodes go live every Saturday you can watch us on youtube.com/@fallingforlearning, or listen on all major podcast platforms such as Apple, Google, Audible, Spotify and much more for more resources, visit falling in love with learning.com we really appreciate you. Have a wonderful week.