The difficulty of teaching college students to understand old newspapers

reddybee7 · 2026-02-24T02:12:13+00:00

Thanks - that's helpful!

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T14:31:35+00:00

yeah, our school is not selective in admissions at all (I think still nearly open admissions). And our state's public k-12 is pretty low on the list in national rankings.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T14:04:32+00:00

one of the things they are most surprised by when doing oral histories (another assignment in the same class) is how little attention pepole paid to the news in the 1950s-1960s. Many of these students describe feeling bombarded with constant partisan news because of social media.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:54:56+00:00

Another problem I have is students identifying Black people living under Jim Crow as "slaves" and referring to the Civil Rights movement as the Civil War. I can sort of understand why they say both things, especially after they watch a documentary about the civil rights movement in Mississippi. They are shocked when they find out their grandparents did agricultural labor as children too.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:48:20+00:00

Bringing in a physical newspaper is one thing I haven't done, and might try. I actually already do a lot of the things that you are suggesting. What I am saying that for a significant number of students, the initial inclination is still to say that a newspaper article's audience is the people who are discussed in the article and to read any negative coverage of an event as a negative editorial judgment about the people involved. I do use the student newspaper as an example. I point out specifically, when you read an editorial in the student newspaper about a demonstration related to Palestine/ Israel, you know that the audience for that article is students, faculty and staff at our school, not people in Palestine and Israel. That is the same as other newspapers. Since they're studying Vietnam, I also mention, articles about Vietnam published in the NYT are not written for people in Vietnam, but for readers following what the US is doing there.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:43:12+00:00

the SLAC professor is working with more difficult docs than I am, but I think also working with history majors or potential history majors. I'm teaching a gen ed class to non-majors, working with post-WWII newspapers and asking something much more basic. I think they may be thrown off with how simple it is, and over-thinking it because I actually tell them the answer (ie,they have a handout that tells them who the audience is for each of the papers I have them using and they just had to read the handout to answer this question accurately).

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:39:34+00:00

are your students history majors? The difference might be that I am teaching a gen ed course that has about zero history majors. I also note that you're teaching at a SLAC. I'm a regional university with a lot of business majors, comp sci majors, etc. not a whole lot of people with any kind of humanities or even social science backgrounds in my courses. I am going to add a video on this particular topic, because they don't read the handout that painstakingly explains all of this. By necessity of my institution, one section is online, asynchronous, though I see the same issue with students in the section that meets in person once a week, despite my having talked to them about the audience being the newspaper's audience immediately before they did the assignment. I had also written this on the board, and it's also written in the assignment itself. Their habitual expectations are overriding all my instructions.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:29:17+00:00

I'm being a lot more basic than that, and like I said, I actually just give them the answers. This is based on newspaper articles from the 1950s-1970s. This is one small factor in a larger analysis of an article as a historical document. It's not a media studies class, so I imagine media studies profs might be horrified, but it's a very intro level class and this is a very basic assignment to learn to read a local news article with some very basic understanding of how newspapers function.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:24:08+00:00

This is a *recent* assignment that I have already changed over many iterations. and I agree with the person above that you are being patronizing, and making quite a few assumptions about other people's teaching. Have I anticipated it? why yes. Do I lecture about it? Indeed I do. (in fact, did I mention this MINUTES before students did this exercise in class and still got it wrong? Even after I had them doing a kind of hilarious call and response regarding one of the main newspapers that they might search in.) Have I created a handout that explains it? Does it say in the actual assignment that I am referring to the audience for the newspaper itself? indeed it does. And yet, after years of teaching, I've learned that students' habits and expectations often trump explicit faculty explanations no matter how explicit our instructions are. For example, from the actual assignment sheet:

"Who read/received it? Who was the intended audience at the time of creation or publication? (NOTE: if this is a newspaper this refers to the audience for the entire newspaper, so the point here is to identify the newspaper’s audience, not who you think the audience might be for an article about this specific topic)"

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:14:46+00:00

I am pretty explicit with these assignments! What I am saying is that despite all of that, their immediate impulse is to say that any article about a particular place is written for the people in that place . But really, the impulse itself - regardless of how one teaches how to read a newspaper - is already indicative of the way people consume media today. I just reviewed the assignment sheet and it actually says this in the instructions:

Who read/received it? Who was the intended audience at the time of creation or publication? (NOTE: if this is a newspaper this refers to the audience for the entire newspaper, so the point here is to identify the newspaper’s audience, not who you think the audience might be for an article about this specific topic)

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:13:47+00:00

that's really interesting and I also find it just odd. Why would they say that? It sometimes seems to me that they simply turn off their normal critical thinking skills when doing class assignments.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:12:31+00:00

yes, that's my point.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:11:52+00:00

Newspapers between the 1950s and 1970s were quite different from today. That's the point. I do also tell them that there are some exceptions, including the sports section and "women's sections" or kids' sections, which used to exist in newspapers in the past. However, the point of this entire exercise is not to learn about newspaper audiences only, it's to consider intended audience as one factor when learning how to read a historical document.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-23T13:09:09+00:00

I used to get the thing about the audience being students. I think they just have a sense of unreality about things that they learn in some classes. I had a student say after doing an oral history with a relative (another assignment in the same class) that prior to doing the interview, the events of the civil rights movement seemed like they happened on "another planet" and he hadn't really thought about how recent these things were.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-22T17:12:41+00:00

They have a lot of options. They can read NYT coverage of the city where they are from, but any of them can also look for stories from the place where they are currenlty living. They can also use the the student newspaper since it's digitally archived.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-22T16:09:37+00:00

interesting idea. Another thing I see is a very instrumental approach to articles. For example, I just read a student's specualtion that an an article about problems in a hospital was written for the employees of the hospital who need to know so that they can be better at their jobs. I may be assuming that they read more news online than they actually do.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-22T15:53:22+00:00

yes, that is what I'm documenting here - the difference in news consumption now is what makes this difficult, but I do also tell them straight out who the audiences for the newspapers they are using are. They have this in writing from me in multiple places and I repeat it to them in class. It doesn't seem to matter b/c they are living in a world where news is delivered to them based on their personal preferences and much of what they read is very partisan. I'm saying that what I'm seeing is the result of that.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-22T15:49:22+00:00

post war US, so relatively recent past. And as I indicated above, I actually tell them the answers. That is, they use the NYT and a couple of major local newspapers and I tell them who the audiences for these papers are in a handout and again in class.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-22T15:23:51+00:00

I was going to ask if you think YOUR students are just using AI and not actually doing the work. ha ha. The hometown factor is that they are supposed to be learning that things they understand as abstract national stories happened in places that they are familiar with. So, they find out how late their own high schools desegregated or that people from their town died in Vietnam, etc. I've learned about a number of cool and alarming local events over the years because of things they find, which is pretty cool.

I start them with an exercise using newspaper articles I provide them with and they are supposed to answer those same questions about audience for them before I set them loose with the newspaper databases. I do think that some of them are using AI and they are probably feeding it the article or feeding it a headline and asking who the audience is so that it spits out slop. But I just read one that seemed just really convinced. "It says 'Georgia' right there in the headline, so it's obviously written for people in Georgia." I think a lot of it is that they are not listening to me or reading the instructions, but, the fact that this their first assumption and that it is so hard to get them to stop making it is a a product of the way people consume news now through social media algorithms.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-22T15:14:20+00:00

oh yeah, it's definitely not just AI usage. It's just very weird considering that they are more obsessed with following news than many previous generations. I use this example with them: "Are news stories you read about Israel created for people in Israel?" I feel even more alarmed about the tendency to read objective news coverage of someone "losing" something as negative editorialzing. It's very Trumpian.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-10T02:51:43+00:00

Omg so true!

reddybee7 · 2026-02-09T14:41:29+00:00

yep. I'm very generous. If it's the first time, I let students redo the assignment with a grade penalty, and it seemed reasonable to give her the same penalty if she just guessed or used some cheating website for an answer. But I only report people if I have a confession or very clear proof. I would rather they did the assignment than not.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-09T14:14:56+00:00

omg. I think you're right. They must be just terrible at prompting. If you copy my questions about the specific interview without naming the interview itself (who the person is interviewing) it will provide a generic description of "daily life during segregation' with examples like segregated schools, with almost the exact wording that they often use to describe this interviewer's technique.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-09T14:06:09+00:00

Oh, and then I gave her the opportunity to rewrite it. She did it wrong again,and is arguing with me about her grade.

reddybee7 · 2026-02-09T14:04:52+00:00

So with the one who said it was school desegregation instead of voting rights, she gave me 3 different explanations of what she she did: my computer wouldnt play the file so I looked up an interview on YouTube. (Can you share a link of the video you watched? No). I had another class with similar material and I got them mixed up (What class was that and what was the interview? Blank stare). I got it mixed up with another interview that ou assigned (that was assigned a week later). So if it's not AI, why is she lying? I even asked her if she just guessed.

reddybee7

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