This week, Grade 12 English Language and Literature students have elected to modify a unit that normally explores rhetoric and persuasion used in speeches made by former US president Barack Obama. Instead, students are taking advantage of the current midterm elections in the USA and the massive quantity of rhetorical content created by the campaign teams of various political candidates. They will be evaluating speeches, websites, advertisements, social media posts, interviews, and more, in an effort to deconstruct each candidate’s use of political narratives, rhetorical language, and visual storytelling.
The seniors chose to look at the campaigns of the State of Michigan’s senate race between Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed and Republican nominee, Mike Rogers. Students will work in teams to curate a body of work from each campaign and to analyze ways in which these candidates are connecting to their varied target audiences of voters. They will also have an opportunity to use these strategies in debates while role playing from the perspectives of the two candidates.
The unit will end right around the time that the election results are made official, so student will have a chance to see if their evaluations of the campaigns matched the outcomes of real-world events.
So far, students have intuited some salient questions while choosing the campaigns to analyze:
“Who came up with this system?”
“Does anyone understand American elections?
“Why is this so unnecessarily complicated?”
“Are these elections intentionally complicated so that people don’t understand how politics work?”
While the actual complexity of the US election processes might never be fully understood, students should come to understand that simple rhetorical techniques outlined by Ancient Greeks like Aristotle are still in full effect today.