About the Strategy

Arguably, the most difficult work we ask students to do in the field of social studies is to wrestle with the idea of point of view. Because students have largely been schooled to work with "the facts" of history, they often fall into the habit of accepting any historical message they encounter at face value. Furthermore, they often look to teachers to interpret for them any ambiguous pieces of information with which they are faced. Students who do recognize propaganda for what it is may tend to dismiss these resources as lacking any historical value simply because they represent a particular point of view. However, these same students may not realize that all historical documents, materials, and resources represent someone's point of view.

To help students become more comfortable with gathering information from resources that have a clear point of view, it is important to offer them a steady and varied diet of materials that are open to interpretation. As they work with these documents, students must be asked to offer and share their own interpretations. To become prepared to do this, they will need guidance in methods for evaluating these materials and drawing educated conclusions based upon them.

In their analysis of non-text primary sources (including propaganda materials), students would need to include the following steps:

• gather background information on the time period, place, and culture that the materials come from;
• determine point of view;
• ascertain the goals and purpose of the materials; and
• think about the material's relative effectiveness.

In sum, the student evaluator will try to determine why the creator of the materials made certain choices, and whether those choices were successful and/or detrimental on many different levels. Ultimately, students who go through this process will not only gain a better understanding of the materials studied, but a more holistic understanding of the historical period in question.

Propaganda posters, signs, pamphlets, and songs are especially useful sources in this process. Not only are these materials generally engaging and compelling, but they also build reading, interpretation, and analytical skills that are useful far beyond the social studies classroom. These are the same skills that students will call upon when they encounter advertisements, commercials, and other marketing media in everyday life. They are also the same kinds of analytical skills they will bring to bear when reading a newspaper article or listening to a news broadcast. And, once these skills are developed, students can challenge and evaluate all history resources, whether textbook- or article-based, or in documentary or lecture format.

In a chronologically based U.S. history curriculum, beginning every unit with an exercise focused on posters or other propaganda materials can provide motivation for students to learn about a particular era. This can lead them to learn more about the values and cultural norms, laws, immigration and population changes, foreign influences, economic influences, and political powers for any given time period. Then, at the end of the unit, students can be asked to compare propaganda posters or materials to assess how well they've internalized what they studied.

This same model can be used to analyze popular songs or propaganda songs. These are especially useful when studying the revolutionary and Civil War eras, as well as for more contemporary periods such as the Vietnam era. (You may want to devise a set of analysis and comparison questions tailored explicitly for songs.)