Make your own poster
- Apply at least three propaganda techniques deliberately in an original poster
- Explain each technique used and the response it is designed to produce
- Critique a classmate's poster by identifying its techniques without being told
- Reflect on how making propaganda changes how one reads it
Overview
Students make a poster for a harmless cause (a school event, a fictional product, an invented campaign for or against pineapple on pizza) using the techniques deliberately, then trade and analyze. The exercise is the applied form of inoculation: a student who has built a bandwagon appeal recognizes one for life. Keep the subjects trivial; the point is the method, and real political causes will divide the room and obscure it.
Period one: brief and plan
- Brief (10 min). Each student or pair draws a cause from a hat. The poster must use at least three techniques from the catalog, named in advance, and must give no reason. That last rule is the lesson.
- Study (15 min). Students browse the archive and the technique index for models. Point them to Slogan, Transfer, Bandwagon, Appeal To Fear, Glittering Generalities, and Plain Folks as the easiest to execute visually.
- Plan (25 min). A one-page plan: the cause, the audience, the feeling to produce, the three techniques and where each will sit on the sheet, a slogan of five words or fewer.
Period two: make
Students produce the poster, on paper or in a design tool. Circulate with one question: what is this spot doing? Each element should be a decision. Finished posters are handed in without the plan.
Period three: trade and analyze
- Gallery (10 min). Posters go up without names or plans.
- Pin it (20 min). Each student takes another student's poster and writes its pins: technique, location, one-line reading. No talking to the maker.
- Reveal (15 min). Makers read the pins against their plans. Did the reader find what was intended? Did they find something the maker did not plan? Both outcomes are instructive.
- Reflection (5 min). Written, one paragraph: now that you have made one, what do you notice about the posters and advertisements you see?
Rubric
Three techniques named and executed (40%); plan explains the audience and the feeling (20%); the slogan does the work a slogan does (10%); the analysis of a classmate's poster finds its techniques (20%); reflection (10%).
The plan, the poster, the analysis of a classmate's poster, and the reflection, scored on the rubric. The analysis is the key piece: a student who can find the techniques in an unlabelled poster has met the objective.