“This is just so biased!” I (Kate) overheard a student say in a small group discussion about an assigned op-ed. When pushed to explain how and why they thought it was biased, the student noted that the author was making an argument, and that while it was supported by evidence, a “newspaper article” should be neutral and unbiased. Other students in the class agreed. In reflecting on this interaction, I realized that the students simply failed to recognize the distinction between the genres of op-eds and news reporting and the very different rhetorical conventions associated with each.
If you stop to think about it, you’ve probably encountered similar experiences. Genre conventions that we, as faculty, understand are more opaque to undergraduate students who may be reading and evaluating them for the first time. This challenge is exacerbated by the ‘flattening’ effect of encountering information online, wherein genre and contextual clues are even less obvious due to uniformity of presentation. When confronted with source types outside of peer-reviewed, academic journals, which are familiar to political science students, many students don’t have a natural sense of the genre of what they are reading; they are unable to distinguish between bills, policy briefs, agency websites, press releases, op-eds, news articles, legislative testimony, and letters to/from elected officials.
It was this observation that inspired Kate Knutson (Political Science) and Rachel Flynn (Library and Archive) to recognize a pedagogical opportunity to help students understand that what they read changes how they read. This led to a multi-year, collaborative partnership between us to teach students the concepts of genre and rhetorical context within Kate’s course, U.S. Public Policy (POL-200).
The results of this collaboration are detailed in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Political Science Education, entitled, “‘What Am I Reading?’ How Teaching Genre Improves Civic Skills.” We argue that teaching students to recognize and consider the genre and rhetorical context of the information they read is a critical civic skill that will help them more effectively navigate the complex and confusing world of contemporary political communication. The article offers a distinct, genre-focused pedagogical approach by bridging the gap between library science research on information literacy and political science literature that uses innovative reading and writing assignments to improve civic skills. We share practical classroom activities and strategies that can be incorporated into many different courses and we present assessment data that supports their use.
If you’re finding your students are seeing “bias” in everything they read or are having trouble figuring out what sources are appropriate to use in an assignment, our research suggests that you might be dealing with a genre problem. Teaching your students about genre and how to recognize the writing conventions associated with different genres will make them stronger readers and writers and also better prepared to jump into civic life.
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Kate Knutson,
Professor in Political Science
Rachel Flynn,
Instructor in Library and Archives