USING PROPAGANDA to PERSUADE YOUR AUDIENCE

Today we want to share our latest INNOVATION ZONE project that is taking place this morning over in our Preparatory classes.  Since we have been studying PERSUASIVE TECHNIQUES in ADVERTISING and ACADEMIC WRITING we felt it a great opportunity to have the students use these (hopefully) learned techniques to promote and persuade their audience (US, or any of you who would like to see them?) in next week’s presentation time during the INNOVATION ZONE. I will explain it below…

The use of propaganda in our lives is perpetrated by governments, associations and other groups who want to sway and persuade audiences to follow their ideas and beliefs.  The THREE techniques we shared with our young teens in Hazirlik were:

ASSOCIATION – Celebrities, Jumping on the bandwagon of groups, fashions…

LOADED LANGUAGE – Positive or Negative

EMOTIONAL – Vanity, Fear, Humor etc

So, I made two adverts that are self-explanatory once you click the links. 

ADVERT ONE

ADVERT TWO

You can see that I have used the same pictures for both Edu-Commercials.  That is another scaffolding attempt to get students to see that if emotive language, association and loaded language are used they can be persuaded to follow the commercial/advert maker’s idea.  I intentionally exaggerated the negatives and positives to show how far people go to persuade their audience.  I decided, however, not to use overly-graphic images since that can turn people off who are sitting on the fence.

So, how are we expecting to transfer this to the students’ collaboratively creative minds?  We will be putting them in groups, chosen by our desktop app, Triptico (that way everyone participates, as it is done randomly) then we will ask the students to discuss in groups of FOUR to decide upon which social issue they feel strongly about.  For this to work, and assure that everyone has a voice and the chance

to persuade using the techniques stated above, each student is being given 3 minutes to convince their peers which social issue they want to promote.  Once the 3 minutes are over, a vote will be taken, and that is what that group will research and complete for presentation next week.  We will now have FIVE different propaganda campaigns next week.  We will share with our school's colleagues and have them see our students participating in this creative & collaborative process.