A group of students gather in the library to learn about the many academic resources available at Olney Friends School.
Spend an afternoon roaming Olney Friends School’s hallowed halls and you will inevitably hear two words uttered by at least one member of our faculty: “citation needed!”
The phrase, which is intended to encourage conscientious, well-developed argumentation, has become a mantra of sorts for both teachers and students alike in recent years. In a dynamic, globally connected technological landscape rife with abundant misinformation and overt bias guised by convincing rhetoric or clever headlines, being “informed” is both as important and challenging as ever. In other words, it has become easy to get duped, especially when the internet is involved. The issue of making fallacious statements is not unique to high school students, however. “People, in general, have a nasty habit of just saying stuff without having anything to back it up,” said Eric Lundblade, the Junior humanities teacher at Olney. “So, one thing we really try to focus on is having students defend their claims with evidence.”
For Lundblade and fellow humanities teacher Emily Carton, both in their third year at Olney, a major pedagogic goal was to craft a way for students to take accountability for the ideas they produce on campus, both socially and academically. Their method falls somewhere between a traditional foundation in scholarly research and the quizzical world of online memes. “I think memes are a really good way of teaching, and they’re really popular these days,” says Carton. “In fact, what is a meme if not a highly repeated idea?”
Memes, which are widely thought to function as “units of culture,” have permeated the digital realm of social media and popular websites like Reddit for years by fusing recognizable imagery with collectively reciprocal sentiments or ideas. “It was just the sort of thing we knew students would relate to,” said Carton when asked how the popular meme made its way from the internet to the classroom. “We just kept saying ‘citation needed, citation needed.’ It’s sort of like short-hand for saying ‘I’ll believe you when you show me evidence.'” Just as memes travel almost effortlessly through cyberspace, “citation needed” has become a ubiquitous staple of Olney’s social lexicon, used as often during lunch table discussion as it is in formal academic situations.
Humanities teacher Eric Lundblade regularly uses memes like the one above to illustrate the importance of developing an opinion through research and deliberation rather than blindly trusting potentially dubious sources.
Unsurprisingly, then, finding quality evidence — or, perhaps even more importantly, knowing how and where to find quality evidence — is a primary component of an Olney education. Part of understanding what constitutes good evidence, however, is also understanding what does not. “We’ve been encouraging students, whenever they hear something of dubious truthfulness or dubious support, to challenge that by saying ‘citation needed,'” says Lundblade, who compares the phrase’s use in a real-time dialogue to Wikipedia’s feature that allows users to challenge questionable, unverified content on the site.
Students are expected to do more than simply challenge claims, though; they are also expected to know how to produce the citations needed to help validate their statements. Throughout their tenure at Olney, students conduct significant research, which is prevalent in both the Junior Research Paper (or JRP) and the 20-page “Graddy Essay,” produced during Senior year. As research skills are vital to a successful Olney career, all students began their academic year with a formal introduction to the abundant resources available locally. Split into two groups, students had the opportunity to navigate Olney’s library — which contains nearly 10,000 volumes and several dozen magazines — while also registering for a card at Barnesville’s Hutton Memorial Library. This educational event also coincided with many students earning their first “Olney Letter.”
Research 1, which is an English Letter and a prerequisite for later work in the humanities, is earned by students demonstrating an ability to efficiently maneuver their way through the many sections of the campus library. “Students went on a Library Scavenger Hunt that asked them to search for titles, authors, and topics using the library catalog, and to locate books using Dewey Decimal numbers,” said Anne Marie Taber, the school’s librarian. Research 1 is the first Olney Letter in a 5-Letter progression which not only emphasizes the ability to find and properly utilize library resources but also explores search terms, appropriate research topics, primary and secondary sources, bibliographic software use and organized note taking.
Anne Marie Taber, Olney librarian, awards Abraham Song the Research 1 Letter.
