Student Learning

PoLT Online Professional Learning Resource – Principle 2

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Vignettes: Later Years - Political cartoons

Back to Principle 2 - Vignettes: Later Years

Example

Political cartoons

Jesse’s Year 10 students are becoming increasingly aware and critical of the social/political world around them. He negotiates a scrapbook task that focuses on the concepts ‘issue and satire’. The students are expected to collect one political cartoon each week for a specified period, annotate them and complete a checklist of characteristic techniques. Jesse models the process. He identifies an accessible cartoonist’s work and distributes a sample annotated cartoon with completed checklist of characteristic techniques. The class is encouraged to discuss observations and pose questions. As a group they progressively refine working definitions of issue and satire. Students aim to similarly analyse their weekly cartoon. Jesse facilitates a weekly ‘show and tell’ round table discussion where individuals share their scrapbook cartoon annotation in a group. They also cite print or web sources. As the students’ confidence and ability increases Jesse introduces two more challenging cartoonists. Through random selection, half the class explores one cartoonist, and half collects the work of the other. The focus of the round table discussion challenges students to compare perspectives and techniques. Jesse’s role as a facilitator becomes less active. He encourages students to construct substantive questions and on request assists with prior knowledge of an issue’s history or politics. In the final stages of the project, groups select their own cartoonist and write a weekly, fluent cartoon analysis. This requires the students to synthesise their annotations into sentences and paragraphs. The groups then educate the class about their cartoonist’s viewpoint on an issue through either an oral presentation using overheads or a PowerPoint presentation.