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Over many years of teaching, I have become increasingly dismayed by the lack of basic awareness of current events among traditional-age college students. The particular comment that symbolizes this situation for me came as part of a conversation just before the first anniversary of the September 11 tragedy. A reporter for our local paper, THE SIOUX CITY JOURNAL, was preparing an article assessing public thoughts and mood one year after the dramatic events, and she called me to arrange a telephone interview. She agreed to call back in a few hours, saying that she wanted my assessment of how college students had changed in the previous year. I had a class session immediately prior to the scheduled interview, so I began the class by directly asking the students about the impact of September 11 on them, one year later. Some talked about a general sense of insecurity, and then one student indicated that he now felt it was more important to keep up with the news. A second person agreed, and then a third student, sitting in the front row, said, "Yes, I think so. Now I try to read a newspaper or watch some television news at least every month or so." She said it seriously, not as a joke.
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On three occasions in recent years I have administered a brief survey on the opening day of particular classes, to assess news awareness. I make no claims that it is a scientific or broadly based study, but the results reinforced my concern. I asked students to self-describe their awareness of news or current events, choosing from four options: very aware, somewhat aware, only slightly aware, or not at all aware. In all three classes, about half of the students selected one of the two options at the bottom of the scale (slightly aware or not at all). Answers to a second question confirmed another widely suspected trend: to the extent that they followed the news, sources they consulted were online or on television, seldom printed sources like newspapers or magazines.
Student explanations are that they simply are too busy, but many also express a disinterest, commenting that they "don't like politics" or are uninterested in news unless it affects them directly. It sounds like a matter of mere personal preference, akin to statements such as "Soccer bores me" or "I prefer Vietnamese food," with scant appreciation for the influence that knowledge of news or current events has upon citizenship, voting, and ethical decision making, with ripple effects that impact the whole world.
I teach in a small, mildly selective private liberal arts college in the upper Midwest, with students drawn mostly from the region, and I have no idea how my impressions would compare with student constituencies on the two coasts, or in the South, or at more or less selective schools. However, we represent the heartland, the middle America so many people talk about, clearly an important slice of life beyond the Beltway. When trends of any kind become accepted here, we know that they are truly national. Thus, if the disinterest in news here is any kind of barometer, I am concerned.
Yet I want to be more than a professor who sounds like a scolding parent, trying to play upon guilt. My job is to help widen the world of my students and to nurture a fascination about topics and issues they may have barely encountered. What I can do is become more intentional about incorporating into classes a direct focus on news items, to draw students into animated discussions about current events and to encourage their own discovery. Here are two experiments I have tried thus far:
- Each spring in recent years I have taught a course titled "Religion, Politics, and Society in the United States." We consider church-state issues, historical examples of religious social and political activism, modern patterns of such activism, religious relationships to political trends, and personal responses and evaluations by students. In the very first semester I quickly learned that I assumed too much when I tried to initiate discussions of recent news or about topics as basic as the Christian Right. The next time I taught the course I added a "Weekly News Summary and Commentary," requiring students once each week to select a news article or commentary pertaining in some way to the course. I asked them to submit the full text of the article, printed from online sources or photocopied or clipped from newspapers and magazines, and they were to attach their own summary and commentary, one half to one page long. The writing assignment included three tasks: the student's summary of the main topic or issue raised by the article, in his or her own words; an explanation of how the article pertained to the course, if it was not self-evident; and a brief discussion of contrasting viewpoints on the topic or issue, including their own view. Every Thursday we spent a portion of the class session discussing the news items that students had identified independently, and it became the most successful portion of the course. In a roundtable discussion, students educated one another about their discoveries, commented on variations in coverage when their selected topics overlapped (sometimes an eye-opening experience for them), and started discussions about their own responses. From my perspective, the assignment accomplished several objectives. First, the mere requirement forced students to scan news sources at least weekly, a habit that many students told me they wanted to continue. Secondly, it established a classwide base of knowledge, provided through shared student discovery, that gave depth to other sections of the course, because we then had to spend less time explaining basic events, names, terms, and issues. And finally, selfishly, students often alerted me to news items and commentaries that I had missed. This assignment is now a permanent part of the course, and I am considering adding a similar requirement to courses such as "Introduction to Religion," "Religion in America," and an ethics class.
- Quite a few years ago I also led a little one-credit course (in a curriculum where three- and four-credit courses are the norm) titled simply, "Current Issues in Religion," intended mostly for religious studies majors or minors. For reasons similar to those discussed above, I had discovered that our students were barely aware of periodicals like THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, COMMENTARY, and others, even though professors had mentioned them in other courses and had assigned articles from them. We met in a seminar room once a week over the lunch hour, with students allowed to bring food if they wished, and I envisioned a relaxed format where we could have free-wheeling, animated discussions of current issues. I arranged for a group subscription to THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY for the length of the semester (apparently an unusual request for the magazine's staff, but they were kind to accommodate us), accompanied by other assigned readings from CHRISTIANITY TODAY and single examples from THE ATLANTIC, COMMENTARY, and SOJOURNERS, when especially interesting articles arose. We focused on the news sections, plus other designated articles, and we held one another accountable through a class compact committing ourselves to adequate preparation. We also established rotations of short "discussion starter" papers by students, and we had occasional quizzes. The course was graded, but because it carried only one credit, it was a low-stakes class, primarily intended to introduce majors and minors to a culture of ongoing dialogue about current religion-related issues, based upon the regular reading of a magazine throughout the semester. As in the other course described above, several students indicated that they intended to continue the habit, and a political science colleague successfully borrowed the idea for his department, based on a subscription to THE ECONOMIST.
Other course pressures have prevented me from repeating the class, but I intend to. Next time I would add quality online sources, an addition that accommodates emerging student patterns and also provides fuller access to topics related to world religions. Yet I still would plan to have the other sources supplement the regular reading of a single, selected magazine subscription in print, providing continuity and a helpful starting point.
My experience as a teacher includes repeated reminders that I assume too much. I use jargon that has become second nature to me, not realizing that I am leaving many class members confused. I assume that all entering college students already are capable of abstract thought, but studies remind me that it is a skill that still must be developed in almost half of our new students. I would argue that awareness of news or current events is another example to add to the list. I cannot assume that my average student listened to "Morning Edition" on NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO this morning or read a newspaper in the past couple of days. Whatever I can do to spark an interest in news will serve religious studies by providing examples and connections for our students, as well as serving the general well-being of our society through educated and aware citizens.
Bruce David Forbes is professor of religious studies at Morningside College and coeditor of RELIGION AND POPULAR CULTURE IN AMERICA (University of California Press, 2005).
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