Fake news is a real problem. A recent study by the Stanford History Education Group concluded that most American high-school and college students are unable to distinguish real from fake information when evaluating online sources. The Stanford researchers described these results as “bleak” and “a threat to democracy.”
The findings come as no surprise to me. As an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California, I teach a first-year writing course required of all incoming students. Those whom I welcome into my classroom each semester are bright. But many have never received any training in how to evaluate information or make credible arguments.
Although largely unacknowledged, teachers of required first-year composition courses now find themselves positioned as our society’s first line of defense against fake news.
Humanities courses have traditionally been the vehicle by which college students learn critical literacy. However, a number of trends over the past two decades — including the rising popularity of preprofessional majors, the restructuring of general-education requirements to require less exposure to the humanities, and job-market anxieties — have resulted in fewer students’ passing through these courses.
Policies permitting students to place out of humanities requirements through high-school AP coursework have also meant that fewer students are exposed to college-level classes where critical literacy is taught. And when students do sign up for a humanities course, their professors often don’t have enough time to spend on the nitty-gritty work of helping them learn to critically assess sources. Instructors who work in the publish-or-perish environment of research universities have even less time.
Required composition courses therefore have often assumed the function of teaching students how to think critically about topics and how to evaluate sources. Because freshman-comp courses aren’t “content” based, and because composition teachers are hired to teach, not publish, we have more time to do this painstaking, one-on-one work.
Teaching critical reasoning is not as simple as it might sound. Most students don’t fully understand that if they want to make a claim about something — let’s say, for instance, they want to argue that Obamacare is inefficient and hurts people — they have to research it to find out what experts in the field have said. As I meet with students about their initial research, I will frequently hear them say something like, “I found a blog by a girl named Kelly who says that now she has to pay more for health care than she did before Obamacare.” Or, “I found a website called Focus on the Family that says Obamacare forces people to pay for contraception.” This moment happens every semester with many of my students, even at an institution like USC, which recruits high-performing students from across the country.
So this is a large part of what I do in my “writing course": I teach students how to distinguish between news and propaganda. I teach them about blogs and anecdotal evidence and sponsored content and peer-reviewed articles, and I help them see that not all the links they click on are equally valid sources of information. This comes as a great revelation to many of them. I teach them that Kelly’s website doesn’t work as evidence, and that Focus on the Family has a political agenda that makes it imperative to double-check the claims the group makes. Eventually students learn this and become pretty good at it.
It takes time and effort for students to write multiple drafts, and for me to correct their work. At USC, one-on-one conferences with the instructors are an integral part of the first-year writing course. For every paper I assign (four or five a semester), I meet with each student for a 20-minute conference. This is the kind of intensive work it takes to walk students through the basics of how to make legitimately sourced arguments. Being critical is hard work.
Writing teachers are our country’s first line of defense against a post-fact culture. But perhaps one reason we find ourselves in a critical-reasoning desert today is because writing teachers are also, uniformly, among the most undervalued and overworked sector of the academic community. Composition teachers have always been the proverbial poor relations in the university family. Required “freshman comp” courses date back to the post-Civil War period. The courses originally fulfilled weeding and surveillance functions, ensuring that graduates could write error-free expository prose. Today freshman comp retains its stigma of being a “service” or skills-based course, a finishing school preparing students for the real academic labor of the upper-level arts and sciences.
Composition’s lack of cultural capital and status is reflected in the fact that so many of its instructors are adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty members. My university’s program offers its instructors, who work outside the tenure track, job security and full access to health and retirement benefits. That is not the case, however, for many of the more than 70 percent of composition instructors nationwide who qualify as “contingent.”
The age of the internet and social media — and of fake news — is such a new development that we have not yet come to terms with how best to educate students and citizens on how to successfully navigate it. The infrastructure is in place. Now is the time to invest in college-composition programs and give them the resources and recognition they deserve as guardians of civic literacy.
Ellen Wayland-Smith is an assistant professor of writing at the University of Southern California, and the author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (Picador, 2016).
