This lesson has been taught for multiple audiences: first-year and senior college students for a specific course assignment, as a drop-in virtual workshop with college students of all levels, and as a continuing education workshop with public school educators. The lesson has also be adapted as an asynchronous module in a learning management system.

This lesson and activity was designed for an upper-division Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) course, CRES 101 Race and the Media. While students didn’t need to include outside research for their media analysis assignment, due to the theme of the class, the graduate assistant and I felt that adding this layer of complexity would further contribute to students’ understanding of bias in knowledge creation, which is a unit covered in the course. After introducing the lesson using Polkinghorne's visualization and sharing the PBS NewsHour video, I divided students into six groups of five students. Each group read their assigned article, discussed and answered the discussion questions, and then reported what they learned to the class. While I link the articles on the online class guide, I also bring enough printed copies of the articles. For printing, I have found that it is easier to copy-paste the text of the articles into Microsoft Word / Google Docs. Although I included a handout with the discussion questions here in Project CORA, in class, I actually display the questions on the online class guide and have students write their answers on a large sticky note, which I provide, along with markers.

This assignment was created for a first year composition course in collaboration with the instructor. She wanted to use infographics as a method for teaching multimodal writing, and I wanted a strategy for showing how to read scholarly articles. This activity was conducted on my second visit to class, so students already had instruction on source types and characteristics of scholarly articles. We'd also had a discussion about the concept Scholarship as a Conversation. I spent the class time following the lesson plan as written, and the following class day the students had time in the computer lab with their instructor to create their own infographics. The final essay for the class is an argumentative essay, requiring 5 sources, 2 of which must be scholarly. An infographic summarizing one of the scholarly articles is required as an attachment to the essay.

We offered this as a standalone workshop, and invited instructors in our writing program to offer extra credit to students who attended. We’ve also adapted the workshop for public library and community settings. The workshop generally takes about an hour and could easily be used in one-shot library instruction.

The workshop opened with an ice breaker, having students brainstorm three things they look for when deciding whether a news Website is believable. They did a quick pair-and-share, and then I recorded what they said on the white board. Next, I broke them into teams of two and asked each to look at two Websites and complete a worksheet. In our lesson, Source A was a Reuters news article and Source B was a Bipartisan Report article. Both are on the same story, although Source A correctly identifies it as happening in January 2016 while B plays it as if it just happened (October 2016). The worksheet included questions which showed similarities as well as differences. It took about 15-20 minutes for the students to complete the worksheets; then we discussed the answers. Talking points: Source A is a Reuters news report, while Source B is from a muckraking site. Both are on the same story, although Source A correctly identifies it as happening in January 2016 while B plays it as if it just happened (published Oct 2016).
Discuss which criteria made a difference in judging the credibility- and which weren’t important- notably, the domain name, the advertising presence,a nd the date were not significant.
Note that it’s best when the reporter has done the reporting themselves, not just repeating other media outlets’ reports.
Would people on the left be more willing to believe the bipartisan report because it fits into their worldview? We need to be careful to avoid confirmation bias: believing a source is legit because we want to believe what it says.
Opinion journalism is a good and valuable resource but it’s different from NEWS. With opinion journalism, you need to verify the facts in the story. In opinion pieces, they are making an argument and you need to analyze it.

After the discussion, I had students brainstorm three criteria they would now use to evaluate a news source. They shared out, and then I collected them for a quick assessment later.