Blogging Pedagogy

Layne's lesson plan focuses on helping students understand rhetorical appeals through use of political ads and charts. Assignment focused on the 2008 Elections, but could be easily adapted to current mayoral elections or any other political ad.

Q. How did your students respond to the assignment?

A. Very well, since they were a class that was generally very excited about the Presidential elections. They were invested in finding the little details in each of the images/ads that showed how candidates sent messages to different audiences--some that come to mind are the use of the American flag in the background of almost every ad, and the Obama campaign's use of a rainbow-colored sunset icon instead of the usual red and blue in an ad about gay rights. The students' analysis of these images inspired a great political discussion that was very text-based and got them excited about rhetoric.

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

A. I had never used this exact assignment before, although I have frequently saved images to the Teacher Folder for students to analyze. I would like to do something similar again with issues that students are politically invested in and like to talk about--maybe ads on both sides of ongoing political controversies.
One unexpected benefit of this assignment was the research students ended up needing to do to understand all the claims in the ad. For example, one ad referenced "Stonewall," which the students analyzing it had not heard of. So I got to reinforce "look it up if you don't know it," which I am always trying to drill into students' heads in rhetoric classes.

Q. What is your favorite aspect of this assignment?

A. I loved watching students get into the nitty-gritty details of the images, analyzing how different font choices and the candidates' poses could have different effects on the ads' audiences. I feel like for some reason it was much easier for them to grasp the idea of "everything's an argument" when looking at these political ads than it has been for students in the past when I've used product advertising or propaganda. I enjoyed almost every aspect of teaching during the Presidential campaigns, though--I would love to think of ways to generate that kind of excitement about rhetoric in my students during non-election seasons!

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

A. I sometimes have difficulty getting the kind of insightful and fun in-class rhetorical analysis we do into my students' papers. If I did the assignment again, I would try to find a way to parlay it into at least some kind of writing assignment, to integrate the rhetorical analysis skills they practiced in class with some writing practice in an immediate, concrete way.