Title: TEACHING NOTES: Section 2
Course: US Election 2016-Leuphana Copy > Section: 2. The Candidates

[fa-info-circle] This is only visible to teachers. Take a look at this introduction when preparing this part of the project for your students.

The focus in this section is on the candidates and their campaigns. This includes their personal and biographical background, their political campaigns and platforms, and their perception in the American public. Understanding who the candidates are and how their public persona is shaped in the election campaign is key to making an informed prediction about the election outcome at the end of the project. This section includes three areas with the following tasks.

[fa-list-ul]   This section includes the following tasks

- ★ TASK: Meet the Candidates

- TASK: Campaign Ads
- TASK: The Candidates' Secret Playbook

- TASK: What are Political Cartoons?
- TASK: Writing a Political Cartoon Analysis
- TASK: Working with Political Cartoons Creatively

★ TASK: Meet the Candidates

In the ★ TASK: Meet the Candidates, students explore the biographic background of the candidates in a combined research and role playing activity. In order to draw attention to the candidates’ persona, students are supposed to stage a role play between news journalists, the candidates (optionally), and a family member. In addition to emphasizing the candidates’ personal background, this approach directs attention towards the significance of the First Family in the U.S. context – an aspect that students can discuss and compare with the situation in Germany. In the research phase of this task, learners work with pre-selected online resources. In addition, they can access the candidates’ social media outlets for condensed statements and talking points, or videos that can give them clues on typical gesture and mimicry.

During the role play, those students not performing should take notes on the content of the arguments, argumentative structure, language use, and overall performance. They could also provide feedback in the form of an 'analog Twitter wall' by writing short responses on paper slips and sticking them on the blackboard. In addition, the role play could be video-recorded for a subsequent analysis and reflection.

[fa-gears]   Tech tips

- Web-access is necessary in order to use the materials on the candidates and their families.
- Ask students to bring/use headphones since many videos are included.

Campaign Ads

The TASK: Campaign Ads introduces students two one important component of political campaigns: the TV ads that air nationally or in specific areas in the U.S. Although social media play an important role in political campaiging today, these ads still reveal much about the campaign strategies and narratives of the candidates.

The TASK: Campaign Ads includes three steps: Students first review a small corpus of successful historic TV ads and deduce successful elements of these examples; they then analyse two TV ads of the current campaign with the help of the TV ad analysis chart that covers visual, aural, textual, and narrative aspects of the ads; finally, students apply these analysis skills to campaign ads of their choice and share the results with their classmates.

A  potential extension activity, the TASK: The Candidates' Secret Playbook introduces the aspect of narrative architecture of political ads. In a video featuring a former campaign strategist for President George W. Bush, campaign ads are likened to storytelling techniques, pointing out that political campaigns typically define the motives of threat, fear, opportunity, hope, villain, resolution, hero, and victim.

[fa-gears]   Tech tips

- Have students complete the preparatory task at home and discuss their findings in class.
- In order to analyze exemplary TV ads, discplay them in plenary mode and show the ads several times, allowing students to fill out the TV ad analysis sheet one column at a time.
- Web-access is required for the subsequent individual analysis of campaign ads (at least one device per group).
- Ask students to use headphones.

Understanding Political Cartoons

By introducing political cartoons and strategies for analysis and interpreting these texts, this last sub-section places the focus on how the candidates and their campaigns are perceived by the American public.

The TASK: What Are Political Cartoons? serves as an introduction to this text genre by asking students to create a small corpus of political cartoons about the ongoing campaign and look for common characteristics.

In a second step, the TASK: Writing a Political Cartoon Analysis scaffolds the process of analyzing political cartoons from the description of visual elements, to the critical analysis of persuasive techniques, to a final interpretation and evaluation of its communicative effect. In this task, students are asked to compose a written analysis. They can upload and share their analyses in the database Learner Texts.

Finally, the TASK: Working with Political Cartoons Creatively gives students a choice of three possible extensions to the cartoon analysis, namely preparing a lead discussion about a cartoon of their choice, making cross-cultural comparisons between German and U.S. cartoons, and conducting a cartoon case study on one election topic or one cartoonist.

[fa-gears]   Tech tips

- The preparatory research for this task can be given as a homework assignment.
- The subsequent analysis of political cartoons can be done offline with printouts of the cartoons or online with all students having access to electronic devices and the platform. In this case, you can have students comment on the corpus of political cartoons online either by just posting reactions below the cartoons or, for example, by suggesting captions or titles for the cartoons in this section.