We recently did a survey in my department that talked to students in the first year rhetoric and writing program about their experience with library instruction. No spoilers for the rest of the results, but something that stuck with me is that students really want rules to use when they're evaluating sources. Personally, I hate rules. Mostly I mean that in terms of library stuff, but it's also kinda true more generally. However, in this context, I do also believe in giving people what they want. To make rules more fun and more active, I turned to an article on Cult of Pedagogy on "finding the funk" (Seale, C. Finding the Funk: 3 Ways to Add Culturally Responsive Critical Thinking to Your Lessons. Cult of Pedagogy. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/funk/). The rulemaking excercise under Strategy 1 really spoke to me. I decided to pilot something like this for my TCID 2080 classes. I also find Theatre of the Oppressed really influential in my teaching (I know, everyone says Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and that too. But also the theatre kid in me is irrepressible) and I use the Analytical Rehearsal excercise to frame some of my activities. In this exercise, participants rehearse a scene entirely directed in their choices by a single motivation. These are the will, the counter-will and the dominant will. The first is the main motivation, the second is what unpacks and contradicts the will, and the third is the union of the two. This dialectical approach walks students through the ideas that they enter the classroom with, the ideas I want them to leave with, and a synthesis of the two. In my new rule making excercise, we begin by rehearsing the rules they’ve been handed down. Using something like slido, I ask students what they’ve been told about assessing online sources. I usually get things back like “never trust a .com” or “you want to find unbiased information.” Both of these have their merits, but these also reflect a slightly out of date model for engaging with the internet and information. This is rehearsing the will, i.e. that primary motivation or mode of engagement with the text. We then move on to rehearsing that counter-will by examining the ways these rules could be undermined, expanded on, broken down, and so on. For example, Wikipedia is a .org but of course we all know not to cite Wikipedia. Except Wikipedia can still be a useful research tool; we don’t want to cite it directly in the same way we wouldn’t want to cite any other encyclopedia or tertiary source, but it can still be a vital part of the research process. We also unpack the idea of “unbiased” information. I like to shift the conversation away from “unbiased’ information because the information creation process makes that impossible. People create information for some purpose and that process introduces a kind of bias. These are just examples of ways we unpack the rules they’ve been handed down. I use concrete examples to ground these rules in the practical skills they want and need and so we all have a shared material to play with.
From there, we move to rehearsing the dominant will, i.e. the synthesis of the will and counter-will. We make our own rules. These usually look like “be aware of bias: why was a particular source written? What were the author’s motivations? How can we pair this source with another so their biases contrast and compliment each other for better understanding?” or “When was this source developed? Do we need something more current or is this sufficient?” The rules they make build on the foundation of what they already know. But they introduce a more complex way of thinking about information that will serve them better as they go through college and into the workplace. We close with one final rehearsal: the classic Know Your Sources excercise I love doing with TCID folks. Overall, I think this worked really well. I might structure it a little better in the future (making the questions clearer, etc) but I think we generated some really good stuff as a class and this is an activity I intend to modify slightly and use with my ENGL 1410 students too.
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