Growing Up in a Misinformed World: Preparing to Engage with 21st-Century News by Reading Historic Newspapers

by Tom Bober, August 2017

Elementary students are not likely running across news stories on social media, receiving alerts on their phones about breaking events, or being enticed by a gripping headline online. They do, though, hear news on television and radio or from adults around them. As they begin consuming contemporary media, skills they learn when working with historic newspapers can give them a foundation that will help them interpret and understand information now and in the future.

Analyzing news reports of the sinking of the U.S. steamship Algonquin by a German U-Boat—a key event bringing the U.S. closer to entering World War I—was a way to pique interest in books in our collection about the war. The event was widely covered at the time. I searched Chronicling America, a Library of Congress database of historic newspapers, to find headlines of the event. Cropping the newspaper to isolate the headline, I gave each pair of fourth grade students two or three unique headlines.

Click to Enlarge +Growing Up in a Misinformed World: Preparing to Engage with 21st-Century News by Reading Historic Newspapers

My students used a close-reading framework highlighted in Christopher Lehman and Kathleen Roberts' book, Falling in Love with Close Reading. In the first step of the framework, they read through a lens. In this case, the lens was to focus on word choice. They did it though, not in one piece of text, but over several headlines. This grounded them in the event. One headline doesn't give a person enough information to build understanding, but many will inform the construction of understanding as students move forward in the framework.

"We're going to look at an important event from 100 years ago," I told my students. "Look at these headlines. What words or short phrases seem important to understanding what happened? What words grab your attention?" I asked students to underline, circle, or highlight those words, warning them that it is easy to think that every word in the headline is important. Focusing on word choice helps them isolate the most important words in the headlines. The lens used in the first step of the framework does not have to focus on word choice. Framing your initial questions to focus students' investigation on text evidence or point of view can also adjust perspective when reading.

The second step in the framework is for students to use the lens to uncover a pattern. I invited students to share the words or short phrases they highlighted. After writing several on the interactive whiteboard, I said, "Now that we have several words, let's look for patterns. How can we group these words? We may start with just two or three words in a group and we'll probably end with two or more groups. Whatever the number, we want to be able to give each group a name that describes it."

The class shared words like German, victim, war, vessel, U-Boat, unarmed, submarine, and warning. After some discussion, they organized the words from their headlines into these two groups:

Looking at the list, you may think not all of these words make sense in their respective category or a word would fit better in the other category. My advice is not to let these concerns derail the process. Avoid validating one student's response over another. There is value in student autonomy when finding patterns through their grouping. In my experience, as students work through the close reading framework, the ill-fitting words become unimportant in actually making meaning of the event. If students are struggling, I may model a small part of this process, but I want the ideas to originate from the whole class.

Students transitioned from finding patterns to the final step of the framework, using the pattern to develop new understanding. To transition, I modeled through thinking aloud with the students. "You have two groups here for your words, a group of things that you can visualize, you can see, and a group of words that are emotional words, words that make you feel something. Let's push that a little further." I asked, "With your first list, what do you see in your mind when you look at these words? With your second list, what do you feel?"

Click to Enlarge +Growing Up in a Misinformed World: Preparing to Engage with 21st-Century News by Reading Historic Newspapers

Shared ideas about a "sunken U.S. ship" and "German submarine" begin to reveal students' understanding of the context of the event while words like "innocent" and "negative feelings" show students identified a perspective in the headlines. When asked what country these newspapers supported in this event, students immediately said the United States. I added, "These news stories, even though they are telling us about an event, have a perspective. If this were a German newspaper from the time, and we could read German, these headlines would probably look very different."

To continue to construct knowledge, I showed students a headline I created: A Ship Sank. "This is the simplest version of what happened," I said, "but you know more. You identified more in those words and short phrases you highlighted. Let's build on this. Give me something that you highlighted that we can use to build on this idea or replace a word that is already here." Knowing that students may want to add details that may not fit early on, I added, "you may have to wait for someone else to add a detail that you can then build on with what you've highlighted, so you're going to have to really pay attention to how this headline changes."

Students suggested additions and edits, one word or short phrase at a time. As the three-word headline grew based on student suggestions, I asked clarifying questions if their contributions weren't clear. Giving every pair of students different headlines guaranteed that, while there would be similarities, every group had unique contributions. Ignoring transitions and conjunctions, the students' headline was choppy, but showed a constructed meaning and perspective.

German Submarine Sank Unarmed American Ship Purposefully Without Warning. All Crew Members Safe. 1 Million in Cargo on Ship. Ship Worth One Million.

Constructing the headline also revealed inconsistencies across stories. For example, the value of the shipment and the ship itself varied across headlines, how the ship sunk was not always clear, and reports of the number of men on board the Algonquin varied. This led to a natural extension of the close-reading framework: generating questions. Questions ranged from broad wonderings such as whether the U.S. was already involved in WWI when the Algonquin was torpedoed to more specific questions like what cargo the ship was carrying.

These questions and the interest that accompanied the lesson were a successful segue into promoting our nonfiction holdings on WWI. Just as important, students practiced important skills they can use when confronted with current news and media.

This strategy doesn't need to be limited to headlines. Using a close-reading framework with a news article encourages students to not take the story at face value, but to develop a deeper understanding of the event presented. Advertisements can be analyzed to examine who the targeted audiences are and what the advertiser wants them to think about the product. Examining editorials can help students identify point of view and support for a stated argument.

Students didn't read one article to inform them of an event. Instead, they surveyed headlines of many articles to construct an understanding of the event using a close reading framework to guide their thinking. Their patterns revealed perspectives, biases, and inconsistencies leading to students asking authentic questions.

Differentiating for Other Grades

The example in this article focuses on a fourth grade class, but the activity can be easily altered for different grade levels. More important than the grade level may be students' prior experience when interacting with historic newspapers and exposure to using the close-reading framework.

• Look at group size. When working with a new format or analysis strategy, working as a whole class allows students to model for each other and build on others' ideas. After students have some experience, have them work in small groups or pairs for part of the lesson with brief whole-class check-ins. For a class inexperienced with this framework or with these types of resources, the entire lesson may be a whole-class activity.

• Alter length of text. This headline activity allowed for texts of varying lengths. Pairs who had a student that struggled with reading or motivation had at least one short headline. This also works well for emerging readers while older students can work with longer or multiple pieces of text. Try the same differentiation with full articles. Events are reported in stories of varying lengths.

• Examine entry point. If time allows, older students can search for their own newspaper headlines, articles, and advertisements. Consider their experience using Chronicling America or another newspaper database. A whole-class collective effort with your modeling can be valuable when first searching these historic documents.

• Adjust your level of support. While the focus should be on students' using the close-reading framework to construct understanding, modeling aspects of the process, using think-alouds, and asking targeted questions to guide student thinking all support students as they internalize the framework. That internalization comes through repeated exposure to the framework. After students use the framework two or three times, begin pulling away the support and carefully watching how students react.

Searching Historic Newspapers in Chronicling America

Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/), a joint venture between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a collection of over 11 million searchable digitized pages of U.S. newspapers originally published from 1789 to 1924. Pages can be downloaded, cropped, and printed. There are several tools and tips to help search the site and find information.

• On the front page of Chronicling America, 100 Years Ago Today shows available front pages from the day in history a century ago. It is a great jumping in point when you want to focus on an analysis strategy but are not tied to a specific event.

• The Recommended Topics link on the front page leads to a listing of over 300 topics covered in the historic newspapers. Each topics page gives an overview of the event, important dates, a list of newspaper headlines linked to the page containing the story, and search strategies for those that want to find more related articles.

• Searching for news on a specific event? The Advanced Search feature allows you to search a specific date. Remember that news wasn't as fast breaking as it is today. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, news could take up to two weeks to appear in newspapers across the country. Be sure to broaden your search dates to accommodate the slower spread of news.

• Search terms can be time specific. You will find results if searching for car, but will find more results if you do additional searches for automobile, horseless carriage, motor car, or "motocycle". When reading headlines and articles from initial searches, I'm constantly looking for new search terms to broaden my results.

• Exploring comic strips can give an interesting perspective of an event or broader cultural perspectives. Comics often appear on the same page of the newspaper each day. If you find a comic strip that you want to explore further, use the arrow link next to Issues in the navigation bar to go to the next issue. Then, choose the same image or page number, using the navigation bar (or use the All Pages link to see thumbnails of every page).

Making the Leap to Interpreting News Today

This activity looked at a news story from a century ago, but these guidelines can be applied to news stories in today's digital world.

• Read, listen, and view widely. Headlines are still prevalent in the 21st century. Search for news stories based on an initial headline through a search engine or news aggregator. Watch news reports without sound and look for the news ticker, typically at the bottom of the screen, to summarize what is being reported.

• Build initial understanding. Work collaboratively to build an initial understanding from many headlines and news blurbs. What common information can be found? How does one piece of information inform another headline or news blurb? Are there conflicting headlines? Is there one that is unique in how it presents the event?

• Look for bias and perspective in words and short phrases. Does a headline appear to be critical or complimentary of a person, group, or event in addition to stating what happened? Do words work to elicit an emotional reaction? Is the perspective in one report different from others? Remember that perspective may be broad, such as a U.S. perspective to an international event, or more narrow, such as the perspective of supporters of a local sports team.

• Ask questions. As students build understanding of what is being reported on and the perspective taken, they should ask questions. What information is missing, incomplete, or conflicting? As students move from headlines to the news stories, they should continue to answer and develop new questions.

• Go beyond the headline. Understanding doesn't end at the headline or news ticker. Once students have an initial understanding of the event and questions about it, they should begin reading, listening to, and watching stories, confirming, answering, and generating new questions, all while building new understanding.

Works Cited:

Lehman, Christopher, and Kate Roberts. Falling in Love with Close Reading: Lessons for Analyzing Texts--and Life. Heinemann, 2014.