Classroom Mock Election Ideas
Election season is a great time to introduce your history class to political discourse and make the topics of your classroom's texts come alive. You can use a mock election as a means of discussing topics such as political parties, bicameral legislatures and campaign tactics. Holding the mock election immerses your students in the topic at hand, and can make it more interesting as the election gives them hands-on involvement in the process.
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Proportional Representation
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Discuss the bicameral federal legislature and the difference between the House and the Senate as it relates to voter representation. You can split your classroom into states of different sizes and use this example to show how congressional seats help less populous states maintain a voice in government. Discuss how each state is granted two Senate seats, but House seats are proportional to a state's population. You can use this to illustrate the influence of smaller states in the electoral college, as well as displaying the influence of congressional representation.
Political Parties
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Have your class do research on the current political stances of the two major political parties. Also, point out historical facts regarding political realignments and the factors leading to such realignments. These facts will help your students learn that the party's stances are not set in stone, but shift with the political tides of the nation. It will also shed light on particular periods of history, such as Reconstruction, the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement. During your mock election, have your students find out the major parties' stances on current issues, then have them discuss how they feel the national parties would feel about their local issues.
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Campaign Strategies and Tactics
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Discuss the role the media plays in elections. This is a great time to remind your students about FDR's "fireside" speeches and of the increasing role television played in elections in the 1960's. Have your students do online research to see how politicians are using newer forms of social media to reach out to their constituents and target their talking points. Your students can use this research to create campaign fliers of their own using the different forms of campaign tactics they have studied. This opens the discussion of how negative attack ads are used against an opponent in contrast to ads touting a candidate's credentials.
Media Coverage and Bias
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Discuss the role the media plays in shaping elections, and have your students bring in an opinion piece to discuss. Teach them about objectivity in the media and how certain buzzwords are meant to evoke a certain political feeling. Reading opinion pieces is a great way to teach about latent bias, and also provides a way of teaching your students how to objectively and intellectually scrutinize an article.
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