Segregation Academies Jigsaw

In this activity, David Weimer used different articles on "segregation academies" following Brown v. Board of Education in order to teach students how to evaluate information from a source and consider the origin of the information.

In Art and Thought of the Cold War, there's a free week before spring break where instructors have more leverage in their planning.  Prior to section, students read Brown v. Board and had a lecture about the decision.  David found 8 different articles about segregation academies, private schools that white kids went to following Brown.  These included recent scholarly articles, newspaper articles from the time, and a recent ABC piece.  David split up the articles so that they were just a few pages.  In section, he gave pairs the various articles or pieces of articles, and asked them to consider where the article was published, where the information comes from, what the content is, and the relevance of the article to segregation academies.  The students had 10 minutes to do this. 

After reading the articles, the students came back together and shared their observations.  As a class, they then considered what can be learned from such sources and how to weigh them.  For example, how should one weigh an editorial from a white judge against a biased newspaper in conjunction with a scholarly article?

See a few of the articles below.