Cues from the Elections

News about political events can be used by the teacher to improve students’ communication skills, help them increase their vocabulary and learn new words and expressions. Several activities can be thought out using this as a base.
When the elections are around the corner, one can find that the streets are teeming with vehicles and people are holding banners, shouting slogans and campaigning for their respective parties. The newspapers, the radio and television are full of information, flooding people with all the details. Children in school, particularly in classes above the seventh standard, are quite aware of what is going on around them. Shouldn’t we then see how we could use this absorbing event not only to increase the awareness of our pupils to national events, but also for other purposes such as forming concepts, developing skills and acquiring desirable attitudes.
Communication, which includes reading, talking and writing, is an important skill. This can be developed by asking the class or a part of it, to give an account of the Indian electoral system. This would be a purely factual account which would clarify certain important concepts. For example, the meanings of “constituency”, “party manifesto”, “polling stations”, “ballot papers” and other words need to be discussed. The children could be asked to prepare a glossary of these words with their equivalents in the regional language.
Another exercise in language would be to cut out from newspapers withdifferent political views, accounts of a certain event or profiles of a political figure. Ask the children to compare these accounts and pick out the expressions which help to create a certain impression endorsed by each of the newspapers.
A cartoon can be put up on the class notice board. There can be a general discussion on the critical comment made as well as the way it is made. Children can collect advertisements put out by different political parties and identify the words which are persuasive. They can pick out logical flaws and misrepresentation of facts.
Another interesting activity would be to study words and expressions that have come to the fore during election time and to find out where they originated. For example, the word “countdown” has its origin in space technology. Yet another study could focus on the use of the ‘passive voice’ where the action gains precedence over the doer. This is used often in describing the polling of votes.
Pupils could be asked to collect the symbols of all the national parties. One symbol at a time could be put on the board and the children asked to put down in writing all the ideas that occur to them on seeing the symbol. After doing this with a few symbols, a child could read out what he has written and the rest of the class could be asked to guess the symbol.
This exercise could be followed by a discussion on symbols, their appropriateness to a particular group and their importance in a society where the literacy rate is low. Column graphs and pie charts could be made and displayed using the abundant data put out by the media. For example, the number of constituencies in each state, the proportion of new votes in the present poll, the proportion of women voters in various constituencies can be graphically represented.
All these activities should help to inculcate a healthy respect for law, an awareness of one’s responsibility as a future citizen of a democratic state and the importance of vigilance for the survival of democracy.