Teachers, if you haven’t asked your students about nonacademic sources, I advise you do so.
Because I don’t want to be in this dispiriting place alone.
A few years ago, Melissa and I started working on a textbook to teach our students how to find, evaluate, and ethically use sources.
We knew a lot of knowledge was lacking, both from decades of teaching and from the current political crises.
Using our draft chapters has shown me how desperately needed this book really is.
Because now I quiz the students on this subject.
One of our chapter is on evaluating nonacademic sources; it explains the difference between academic and nonacademic, talks about when nonacademic sources are necessary in their writing, discusses how to evaluate news sites, warns about reliance on Google and Wikipedia, gives examples of satire news being mistaken for real news, and lists four kinds of sources that just shouldn’t end up in their writing, unless their paper is about unreliable sources.
(We argue that one should not cite 1) other student papers one finds on the internet, 2) cheat sites, 3) sources with no discernible personal or agency author, and 4) religious texts as incontrovertible evidence in what should be secular arguments.)
My reading quizzes ask students to tell me the difference between academic and nonacademic sources and to name one of the four forbidden types of nonacademic sources they should avoid.
The students who do the reading do fine, of course.
But here’s what many of the upper-division students who skip the reading say:
What’s the difference between an academic and a nonacademic source?
- Nonacademic sources are written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
- Academic sources are the things our library has. Everything else is nonacademic.
- Academic sources are reliable. All nonacademic sources are unreliable.
What is one of the four nonacademic sources you should avoid in your writing?
- blogs
- news sources
- film reviews
- social media posts
- this is a trick question–you should never use nonacademic sources in your writing
After I take up the quizzes, I have questions for those students. So you can never cite news? If a pediatrician writes a blog about common problems at checkups, can you not use the info just because it’s a blog? How can you write about foreign policy under Trump if you aren’t allowed to ever cite a Tweet? What if you need census data? Will you just have to skip that information because it’s nonacademic? How are you going to write that film paper if you can’t cite nonacademic sources, since films ARE nonacademic sources?
Fellow teachers, if you haven’t had this conversation with your students, I recommend it. It will be eye-opening on both sides. The information generation just isn’t getting enough instruction on how to filter information. If you want Melissa and I to start the conversation for you, our book is coming out soon.
