An opinion piece written in 1997 by communications faculty Willie Johnson titled "COLLEGES ARE STILL NOT ORIENTED TO SERVE STUDENTS OF COLOR" raises issues of access and belonging in college. I will use this article to teach students to use Lexis-Nexus Academic News, a notoriously fickle but enormously useful database of news.
We’ll start with a step by step introduction to the benefit of Lexis-Nexus as a database and how to craft a search. Once the students have explored how to search for an article, and found the article I’ve designated, I’ll ask the students to answer a series of questions about both how to use the article as a digital object (how can they cite it, print it, or find it again) and also about how to unpack the rhetoric of the era (how was Bill Clinton, what is ebonics). We’ll conclude by asking students to identify, in their own terms the thesis of the opinion piece, posting those theses to a message board that students can review after their own posts.
"COLLEGES ARE STILL NOT ORIENTED TO SERVE STUDENTS OF COLOR." Saint Paul Pioneer Press (Minnesota). Date Accessed: 2017/06/29. www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic.
