Yet more evidence that my students think differently than I do

Before I start, let me note that I do NOT mean to poke fun of my students in my comments below. My students are the products of their educational backgrounds combined with their individual personalities; pointing to any weaknesses in their work is not meant to suggest that they're stupid, lazy, or bad people.

That said, there are a few things in their papers that I find fascinating.

• A fascination with viability and credibility. An author's argument is viable or it is not. It's the medico-scientific metaphor here that's so interesting to me. The argument, it will grow! and live! ...or maybe not. They're also obsessed with authors' credibility. This makes sense - but it's funny to me how small differences in language really signal big differences in meaning to me, the specialist. I talk a lot about "reliability" in class, but not about "credibility." I don't know, perhaps it's because "credibility" seems to me something associated a priori with a person or thing, like hir/its reputation? It's sort of like saying that The New York Times is a credible news source, whereas Weekly World News is not (unless perhaps you're interested in alien abductions). You know that without reading anything published in either one. Whereas for me, "reliability" is a function of the specific - is this author reliable about this topic in this source? To me, there's a difference, though I can understand how to my students (who in this class are I think universally non-history majors), there isn't. I don't consider this a problem in the way that I consider the use of "bias" a problem - but each time I read students talking about a text's "credibility" it jars on me, slightly.
     
• The respect for authority. I have had any number of students tell me that because an article is published in a national scholarly journal, that lends credibility to the argument. And I mean, yeah, I understand that perspective, and the point of peer review is to ensure that stuff published in journals is credible. But while being published in a national journal does suggest that your ideas are more "credible" than if you print them in crayon on construction paper and staple them to a telephone pole, what's interesting to me is that by making such a statement, students are implicitly comparing the journal article to all other kinds of discourse out there. Whereas I don't want to know that the article is credible compared to the rest of the written universe - I want to know if it's credible as a published, scholarly work. Since all published scholarly works are, well, published and scholarly, pointing out that it's published in a journal seems a little redundant. It's like if you were reviewing a Formula One racing car, and pointed out that it's faster than a Volkswagen Bus. Well, yes - but wouldn't you kind of hope that would go without saying? If you're reading reviews of Formula One racing cars, don't you really want to know whether one F1 car goes faster than another F1 car? Again, this isn't something I ding students on (not in this first-year gen ed course, certainly); it's just an interesting difference between learning how to write in a particular academic discourse and discipline from a position decidedly outside that discourse/discipline, and not knowing how to write in any other way.

For some reason, this quarter I find myself especially struck by these small differences in word choice and the larger understandings (or misunderstanding) that they reveal of history as an academic discipline. They're the kind of thing that help me think about how best to get across to my students the purpose of the writing assignments I give them, especially now that my understanding of writing is so very different from theirs.

Comments

[maude lebowski]

totally unrelated to your post, but i love the new layout!

[Dance]

I'm not really sure they are so much thinking differently....

That is, one of the things I hammer into my students is that a scholarly article has more credibility than an article in the local paper, or Wikipedia, or a published work from 1960, or a historical book written by a journalist and aimed at a public audience. Largely I emphasize this during the research process, to encourage them to go through the more difficult steps of finding the most scholarly sources. So I use credibility the same way they do, and I emphasize the credibility of scholarly articles/U Press books. Surely many profs do. I think they are just picking up on that, and integrating it into their papers, without realizing that it only matters in comparison, and really only matters while assembling a research base.

I would probably use reliability to talk about the internal credibility of the article---eg, this author seems to have a chip on his shoulder, this piece on China only uses English-language sources---but I do far less with that concept in class.

Viable, though, don't know about that one.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Dance, that makes sense - in this particular class we don't talk about research at all (it's an intro to history gen ed thing, and I don't tackle that particular bear, since we only have 10 weeks), so it sort of surprised me that it should be such a concern of the students. I think what I mean when I say they thing differently is not at all that they thing wrongly or something, but just that I have total tunnel vision about what I expect them to do and they bring all these other perspectives to it!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

(And thanks, maude! :-D)

[Limon]

My students tend to believe that an article is *less* credible if it's in a peer reviewed journal: as soon as we name something "scholarly," they assume the author is a big blowhard with an agenda.

This might be because I teach in a professional program where many students come to school to make more money and get better jobs, not necessarily to learn new ideas (although I know that plenty of them also value the learning). Still, a fair number of them think academics are weirdo hippies who don't know how to function in the "real world."

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Oy. i was going to write something useful, but all of a sudden two glasses of wine and no dinner and that bloody paper all hit at once.