Blogging Pedagogy

Dale's lesson plan uses Politicalcompass.org as a start point for classroom discussion. The classroom conversation helps students understand how political and social ideologies are created and expressed. Read on for Dale's comments. You can access the lesson plan here.

Q. How did your students respond to the assignment?

A. Students typically enjoy this assignment tremendously. Many are eager to voice positions based on the questions political compass poses to them. Often, debates will arise in class, and we have to work out the issues together. Sometimes I'll take an unpopular position in order to further discussion about issues students may not find initially worth debating.

Q. Is this an assignment you use regularly? Were there any unexpected problems or benefits?

A. I've used this assignment twice, and I'll continue using it when I teach rhetoric courses. It challenges how students (and teachers) think about their relationships to certain ideologies, both social and economic. The questions provided by political compass help students reflect on received opinions that they may not have fully considered. The only problem with this assignment is that you have to watch the time. While you want to generate conversation, you also have to draw lines, ask students to make quick decisions, and move on in order to complete the quizz before the end of class.

Q. What is your favorite aspect of this assignment?

A. I like watching students light up and get excited over social and political issues. Because political compass engages ideological assumptions by making readers more aware of their beliefs, this is a great classroom opportunity to reflect on and engage in the common assumptions students have. The questions they are asked often push buttons for them, as well as for teachers. For instance, students nearly unanimously agree that "sometimes it's necessary to spank children." I would never spank a child, and so we have a conversation about this practice in contemporary society. It gets interesting though as the questions on the quizz become more complicated. When questions regarding corporal punishment occur, students are typically more sympathetic and lenient toward law breakers than they were toward child discipline. And I don't hesitate to point that out.

Q. If you were to use this lesson plan again, is there anything you would change?

A. The more you use this lesson plan, the better you become at pacing the class through the questions. This leaves more time to discuss the final group profile that the website provides. Most classes are usually center-left on the graph. That is, they are socially progressive but more conservative when it comes to economic ideology. With more time, it would be interesting to talk about how social and economic ideologies are interrelated, and what this says about our profiles.