Decades worth of ink has been spilled to validate service learning, and an increasing number of first year programs are engaging in service learning and community service projects. The institutional emphasis on service learning relates to students' preference for such courses as well as studies that indicate that engagement correlates to higher retention rates (Astin 1985; Pike, et al. 1997). In Rhetoric and Composition more specifically, one of the key assumptions of these projects is that engagement translates to better grades and more effective writing, that is writing that relies more on deep analytical (critical) thinking than on summary. Though community service has been proven to encourage students to engage with important concepts, the impact of classroom resources (non-traditional, satirical news sources, for example) as tools of to encourage engagement is less well known. A study of how using satirical news sources, The Daily Show in particular, as classroom tools impacts student engagement rests on two important foundational assumptions: viewers of The Daily Show are more engaged and better informed than viewers of other news programs, and experiential learning leads to engagement, and engagement creates better writers.
Viewers of The Daily Show are more engaged and better informed.
Two recent surveys suggest that viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are better informed than those tuning into more traditional forms of news and information. A 2004 Annberg survey suggests Daily Show viewers have a breadth and depth of knowledge about politics and candidates that surpasses other late night audiences and cable news viewers, while a 2008 Pew Research Poll finds Daily Show and Colbert Report viewers are better informed about current events than those who read online sources or watch cable news. These two surveys also suggest that these viewers are younger and better educated than those watch The Late Show and The O’Rielly Factor. Though some research (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006 for example) argued that exposure to these satirical programs could lead to cynicism and alienation from the political process, other research (Cao and Brewer, 2008; Hollander, 2005; Young, 2004) suggests that there is a positive correlation between viewing The Daily Show and participating in civic activities. Cao and Brewer (2008) suggest that “exposure to political comedy shows was positively associated with two of the three time-based activities: Attending a campaign event and joining an organization” (96). Cao and Brewer's study demonstrates that, instead of limiting its viewers engagement with key issues, viewers of The Daily Show are more likely to be engaged in political activities (attending a campaign event, joining a party or issue based organization, etc.) that extend beyond their television or computer screens.
Experiential learning leads to engagement, and engagement creates better writers.
This final measure – engagement – is particularly important given the growing concentration on student success. Among the many tests and surveys aimed at predicting students’ success in an institution of higher education, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) has become one of the most widely known. This kind of engagement has proven to correlate to gains in general abilities (research, critical thinking, etc.) (Gellin 2003; Kuh, Hu, and Vesper, 2000; Pike, 1999, 2000; Pike and Killian, 2001; Pike, Kuh, and Gonyea, 2003; Terenzini, Pascarella, and Blimling, 1996). Increased student engagement also correlates to better grades (Astin, 1977, 1993; Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, 2002; Pike, Schroeder, and Berry, 1997) and a decrease in rates of attrition (Astin, 1985; Pike et al., 1997).
Inside classrooms across the nation, this interest in engagement has bred a renewed focus on experiential and service learning. Central to most conceptions of service-learning is John Dewey’s articulation of the importance of community (1946) and his emphasis on citizenship and civic participation as integral to efficacious educational practices (1900; 1916; 1946). In Composition, in particular, teachers and researchers concerned with service-learning have found that courses that emphasize engagement through participatory learning projects yield better results in terms of paper quality (Bacon, 1997; Herzberg, 1997; Deans, 1998; Shutz & Gere, 1998; Wurr 2002) as well as student engagement (Arca, 1997; Brack & Hall, 1997; Deans, 1997; Dorman & Dorman, 1997; Bacon 2000) and motivation (Bacon, 1997; Brack & Hall, 1997; Flowers 2008).
My Research Question and Hypothesis
Though a significant amount of time has been spent measuring the ways in which service learning impact engagement and the quality of student writing, other activities that might have a similar impact on engagement have yet to be investigated. My study would test the suggestions that other activities, ones that encourage students to think beyond the classroom and to engage with important ideas, have a similar impact on analytical thinking. Watching satirical "infotainment" programs, specifically The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, helps students think more critically about important issues because these activities encourage what Dewey calls “citizenship,” an awareness of one’s place in and responsibility to the community.
To test this hypothesis, I will examine two classrooms: one in which each discussion of controversial topics or current events is accompanied by a video from either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report and one whose students engage only with traditional readings and non-satirical news sources.
I will look to three sources to investigate whether those students exposed to satirical news sources in class are more engaged with the course and the material:
- Classroom Survey of Student Engagement (CLASSE): The CLASSE is the local version of the NSSE, which seeks to test the level of student engagement within classrooms and attempts to demonstrate the correlation between attention/engagement in classroom activities and improvement in grades and retention. The foundation of this survey is the concept of student-engagement theory and the work of Astin (1984,1985), Pace (1984), and Kuh and his colleagues (Kuh, Schuh, Whitt, and Associates, 1991; Kuh, Whitt, and Strange, 1989), all of whom wrote about the importance of student engagement with the community of the university and the necessity of connecting assignments and outcomes to goals beyond the classroom. (Please see Appendix A for a sample of the CLASSE.)
- A textual analysis of student papers:
- Interviews with students and teachers about engagement
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