This week flew by as students at my school held meet-and-greets near their lockers and rallies in the halls, raised money for TV commercials and registered to vote. It was just like a real campaign, complete with student candidates who stood in for McCain, Obama, Nader and the Libertarian Bob Barr.
In the end, Republican John McCain won the election in a squeaker, taking 98 votes to Democrat Obama’s 96 votes. The students learned a lot about the ins and outs of a political campaign and we teachers had a blast leading them through it all.
We had designed our program on my own experience in covering campaigns as a news reporter. We had ballots, registration cards, campaign finance reports, Common Cause and 527 groups. Our candidates, all volunteers from the senior class, ended their three-week campaigns with a debate before the entire student body. They were nothing short of fabulous.
Now that it’s over, I thought about how we’d designed the effort from scratch. Maybe we didn’t have to do that. I went out on the web to see if I could find some materials that could help other teachers to avoid re-inventing the wheel. I found plenty of election materials designed with media literacy in mind. Some other items turned up as well that could also aid us in our media lit efforts.
Before getting into the election it might be useful to see where your students stand on the media literacy continuum. Are they savvy news consumers? Ask them to take the media literacy quiz at PBS Teachers Web site.
Next, engage them in a lesson entitled Critical Media Literacy: Commercial Advertising. It asks students to watch TV and to write down every commercial they watch: what product is describes, the length of each commercial and the number of advertising minutes in a three-hour watching period.
They may now be ready to jump into politics, where the lesson materials are terrific.
At pbs.org, the Independent Lens provides educational materials, lesson plans and worksheets for teachers and students. Among the best offerings is “Please Vote For Me” – what a wonderful little video this is. In 10 minutes, the creator takes us through the campaigns of three 8-year-olds in China who want to be elected as the classroom monitor. This is the first democratic election that anyone can remember in the school and the three tiny candidates don’t disappoint. One of them is a budding dictator, another learns through her tears to be tough on the campaign trail. In the end, students viewers get a great lesson on the ins and outs of political races.
At Cable in the Classroom, teachers, parents and students receive instruction on how to be media-smart, which the site’s authors say is “a 21st Century skill because it provides a framework and method to think critically about the media you consume and create.”
This site offers a nifty learning experience called “eLECTIONS: Your Adventure in Politics.” It’s a three-dimensional multimedia game made in partnership with CNN Student News, C-SPAN and the History channel. You choose a political party and five positions on key issues. You then spin for your turn and move along a board that looks somewhat like “The Game of Life.” It’s pretty cool. You’re rewarded for good choices, penalized for straying from your positions on the issues.
My next discovery was “Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civil Engagement,” developed by Media Education Lab at Temple University, where Dr. Renee Hobbs resides. Rutgers’ own media literacy scholar Dr. Robert Kubey, in our interview last week, described Hobbs as one of the two best curriculum designers in the country.
The Media Education Lab designed “Access, Analyze, Act” for pbs.org. These excellent lessons start with students setting up their own political blogs. They later take a quiz that helps them to determine their “political personality. They are either skeptics, explorers, activists or spectators. My own students took the quiz and really enjoyed comparing notes and deciding whether they agreed with the results. The lessons are in three different sections, eventually taking students through an examination of their own Congress members’ campaigns and positions. These lessons really are well written. Teachers will love them.
A great way to round out the work on elections is to use “A Free and Open Press: Evaluating the Media.” To start, you’ll need a connection in the news media who could give you an hour's worth of wire service stories (or you could take them from the Web yourself). Students play editor by choosing and ordering the stories. Which ones will they choose to report, and how will they make those decisions?
In these ways, students begin to think critically about the media messages we consume each day, whether through political campaigns or through product placement in their favorite TV shows. There's never been a better time to be a teacher, I'm convinced.
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