Gainesville Middle School Principal Sally MacLean called eighth grade government teacher, Justin Wilk, into her office asking him to plan a memorable assignment to correspond with the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election.
With the help of librarians Christine Ware and Evynn Blaher, Wilk planned a week-long “Scrapbook Project” lesson that required students to research both candidates, decide which candidate they supported and create campaign materials.
“We’re now the School of Arts and Sciences, so (Dr. MacLean) challenged me to step up and be a leader, create a cool activities for the upcoming election,” Wilk said. “We decided to do a seven part assignment to utilize that component.”
Specifics of the assignment include creating a help wanted advertisement for the position of President of the United States; researching three issues that each candidate champions; writing a letter to the editor, voicing their opinion on who should be elected president; and creating political cartoons, posters and political buttons.
“We have a historic year,” said Wilk, who designed the assignments to help the students learn about the election process.
Wilk said he is grateful that MacLean is, “a very big proponent of having the kids do critical thinking," and complimented his school for encouraging engaging, higher-level learning actives.
Even though Wilk admits most of his students are still at an age in which they agree with their parents on politics, students are learning more about the issues, political parties and the various persuasive techniques used in the political arena.
For instance, Wilk has shown his students campaign speeches from various news channels that they will analyze for media bias. Recently, they learned how candidates use various advertising techniques in their campaign commercials, such as appealing to the family, bandwagon and the attack ads. They even studied how the use of color and animals in ads subconsciously affects the viewer.
Students had different opinions on which part of the lesson was most appealing to them; many said they liked making posters, cartoon and buttons because of the creative nature of the work.
“I liked the poster (best), because you get to put more thought into it and color,” said sixth period student Riley Weber.
Although Ben Nvodjo said he still supports President Obama as he did before beginning his government unit, he admits he did not know much about the opposition candidate.
“It changed my perspective; I learned something about the other candidate. He also has good ideas,” Nvodjo said.
Eighth grader Anthony Kumba said he learned that one is not always in total agreement with one’s political party.
“You can’t exactly support one party,” said Kumba, “you have to look at two sides too.”
Kumba said Wilk’s lessons opened his eyes to another side of the election---foreign affairs, of which he was previously not aware.
Students have also discovered issues that have become important to them.
“My most important issues would be taxes and the problem with student loans, because my brother just left for college and my sister will go next year,” said Jaqueline Allegra.
Ultimately, students were almost equally divided on which candidate they supported.
Scott Hutchinson said he supports President Obama.
“(The election unit) made me support President Obama more, because I don’t agree with some of the stuff Mitt Romney (proposes)."
However, classmate Derrick Godfrey sees the situation differently.
“Romney seems like a better candidate, because Obama put us more in debt than we were before,” Godfrey said.
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