Reading about Elections

Weekly Reading:
"(Not so) Unprecedented: Media Analysis of the 2016 Presidential Race and its Historical Precedents." by Sox Sperry. Social Education 80(4).
"Political Polling in Past and Present." by Syd Golston. Social Education 80(4).

 My weekly reading was focused on pieces that could help me dive into my unit plan. It may seem a little out of place, but by reading a few articles surrounding my unit, it gave me new ideas and new ways of thinking about my direction. For that reason, I'm really thankful that I decided to dive into reading that was related to media and elections. I feel like I've made a lot of progress as a result of that decision.

Sperry's article is directly related to the concepts I am going to study and my central theme, the media. Upon reading it, I was really excited when I noticed that there was a graphic titled "Six key concepts in media analysis" and that these concepts were lining up with what I believed would be my guiding concepts for my unit.

This graphic is one of my three things that I want to remember. Anytime I get confused on my direction, I want to refer back to this graphic. I want to compare my proficiencies against this graphic. I also would share this with my students so they could refer back to it as well. An additional thing that I want to remember from my reading is how to draw in history while still studying the current election. There were multiple examples on how to do this, but one such example would be to assess political posters from an election far in the past to try to determine which political party it was biased toward. They could analyze that and then move on to analyzing current media documents on our presidential candidates.

There were great media literacy questions that I want to use myself, such as "who is the target audience and how is this message targeted to them?" Another example that could connect to history is to ask how the portrayal of candidates has changed over time. Students should be asking themselves if a source is credible, what makes it that way, and what the author may be selecting to leave out and why they would leave information out if they did.

This article was significant for me because it opened my eyes to new possibilities in my unit. Of course media literacy would be a big part of a unit on media bias, but I'm having a better understanding on how to frame it.


The second reading I did gave me ideas on how to connect and integrate polling and math into my curriculum. I was immediately drawn into this article when I read "the trends that are shared with the American public influence party deliberations, election strategies, turnout, and voting booth decisions" (206).This touches on so many components that I want to discuss.

One essential piece that I come out with is that bias can happen without even trying. Golston provides an example that is significant:

"The problem comes if the sample isn't really random. After what was perceived as a disastrous first debate for Barack Obama against Mitt Romney in 2012, Democratic voters became less likely to answer surveys, as they just didn't want to talk about politics, while newly enthusiastic Republicans did. As a result, poll results shifted towards Romney, even though his actual support didn't increase: it's just that the samples were biased towards Romney voters. If the sample is bad, the results follow" (207).

This is huge! Even if the poll was intended to be a fair sample, it didn't happen that way, and it may not be the fault of the person running the poll. But this information still goes out to the media and they use it - fairly or unfairly. Being aware of how that can happen, even when you're trying not to be biased, is a big piece for students to understand. Another big issue is how questions are worded. One idea I've come up with is to ask students questions (with anonymous responses) where I ask the same question twice but once with positive connotations in the language (programs for the poor) and others with negative connotations (welfare). It could be done with a number of different issues. Then students can see if they voted differently for the exact same thing simply based upon how the question was phrased. It may be eye-opening for some students based upon their responses.



While these readings were short, I spent a lot of time considering the implications for my unit. I think a lot of this will really come in handy when I go to plan the final pieces of my unit. But I'm glad that I'm seeing possibilities of where I can go with my ideas, as I can already see that they fit perfectly within my standards and larger concepts that I would plan to teach. The graphic shows me that, and if I do it all correctly and authentically, I think it would be engaging for students as well. So while this is not my typical content area reading, this was really significant for me in understanding where I'm headed with my unit plan and coming up with a cohesive plan.