Production, Consumption, Distibution
Social Studies teachers should possess the knowledge, capabilities, and dispositions to organize and provide instruction at the appropriate school level for the study of Production, Consumption, and Distribution.
Theme 7 fits most neatly in an economics classroom, and in fact is the biggest stretch in a government classroom. While in history and in geography production, consumption, and distribution comes up when you talk about technology and the change it creates. However in government, one of the only few times that a teacher has a chance to incorporate the theme is with political parties and I took full advantage of this.
In my instructional sequence, I first introduced political parties. I gave students the basics; roles, goals, and history. Then we looked more in depth at the roles. The VA Standards of Learning Essential Knowledge says that political parties will morph their platform in order to gain a majority of the population. Without this majority a party cannot function. Knowing that students had some general knowledge of economics, my cooperating teacher had covered this earlier in the year, I decided to use the metaphor to help students understand political parties. I defined the polling of the population and the actual population’s views as something that political parties consume. They take these ideas and opinions and produce the party platforms. We moved into a lesson on one of the things that political parties produce, advertisements. Using the website, Living Room Candidate we analyzed many ads to see who the audience was and how well the ad was produced based on the audience. We talked specifically about emotion, persuasiveness, truth, and style. My lesson plan can be seen to the right. The YouTube video also shows the ad that the students liked the most and the one that made my point the best. Obama in his 2008 campaign was attempting to reach younger voters by running an Internet ad, showing different popular musicians singing one of Obama’s speeches. It was very well put together and very catchy. This made this the prime example.
I think I did a very well incorporating Theme 7, especially with the theme working better in together courses. I think what could have been a negative and made it a positive. I was able to use it to enrich another theme. There were very few opportunities to incorporate Production, Consumption, and Distribution, but I think I used it in a very big way. Below is a link to a lesson that was specifically designed to utilize Production, Consumption, and Distribution.