intro slides (2-4 on canva)

Students will engage in a social studies activity where they learn about propaganda and create their own propaganda posters, speeches, or scripts. They will explore different propaganda materials and perspectives from different eras. The assignment defines propaganda as organized mass communication with a hidden agenda. Students will work individually on their projects but also participate in group discussions and peer feedback. They should have access to resources to learn about historical events. The teacher will select the topics based on grade level and curriculum. The activity will involve showing examples of propaganda, discussing its components, assigning perspectives or nations to students, and creating discussion groups. Students will have time in class or at home to complete their projects, followed by group discussions and peer reviews. In engaging students with a meaningful social studies literacy activity, students will both understand what propaganda is and be able to reproduce a representation of a propaganda poster, speech, or script for a radio, television, or digital media message. This engages students with meaningful disciplinary literacy learning as they get to explore a wide range of propaganda materials from different mediums, and they also get to explore different perspectives from different eras, including potentially even today in the contemporary world. For the purpose of this assignment, propaganda has the following definition. Propaganda is an organized mass communication derived from a hidden agenda on a mission to confirm belief and action by manipulating mechanisms drawn from a hidden agenda on instrumentality to circumvent individual reasoning and rational choice. So just to introduce the lesson, students will be working on the propaganda pieces individually, however, they will also be needed to be organized in groups of three to four for peer discussion and feedback after. So students will have been introduced to examples of propaganda posters and speeches previously. Furthermore, students will also need to have covered the context of the various historical eras previously. If the context has not been covered in class, ensure students have access to textbooks or internet and a piece of technology so that they can learn more about these events to successfully complete the project. So students will be tasked with creating a propaganda poster, speech, or script for radio, television, or online media message to represent a historic moment in the nation's history. The topics and moments themselves will be selected by the teacher depending on grade level and the relevant curricula. The examples for this lesson in this presentation primarily focus on social studies 20-1, 20-2, and 30-1, 30-2 from the program of studies in Alberta. This actual activity is going to play out in the following way. So as I kind of explained, you're going to show students examples of propaganda kind of right before this activity is introduced. You're going to want to go over the different components of propaganda and materials, what you typically see in them. You may also want to ensure that you're providing access to different resources where students can see these propaganda pieces to help support their own ideas in their own project. You'll want to assign each student a perspective or nation to represent in their project, and then you'll want to create groups of three to four students made up of students who focus on different perspectives and nations, so that way they can really like build on their learning. Either give students a class block, about 60 to 80 minutes to complete the propaganda material, or assign it as something that they'll complete at home for the next class. Finally, after they bring in those propaganda pieces, you'll want to get those students back in those discussion groups made up of three to four students. You'll want to either create discussion points and prompts, or you can use the ones that we will show later on in this presentation. Similarly, for the peer review, you'll also want to use a checklist, possibly create your own, or use something like we're going to show near the end of this video. And you'll want to allow about 20 to 30 minutes for discussion and peer review.