Due to this session being the Mock Election day, we ended up skipping the warmup activity.

The Mock Election (or creative election… it went through a lot of names)! After many weeks of preparations; devising policies, designing posters, playing around with videos and voiceover, we had finally made it to the big day! Kirsti had gotten the students to redesign the layout of the classroom to suit an election hall, with a clear pathway for voters to move through. Students were given roles, from the greeters at the entrance, to the officials ticking off names of voters, and assistants asking voters if they knew how to vote, and lastly the people at the back of the hall with the box for storing votes. Representatives from each party were chosen to advertise their policies and their party just outside the hall as well, with 2-3 students per party. Some of these students also took their videos into the classroom of the other class (the main body of voters in the mock election) to show them the quick promotional videos for each party.

This session was a challenge for them, as they had to stick with their assigned roles, no matter how simple or difficult, and commit to the roleplay of this mock election. They pulled it off wonderfully, with the advertisers out front coming up with little jingles on the day to sing at voters coming through, students with less diverse jobs taking it on fully and having fun with it, and all the students really getting into the votes counting and reviews at the end of the session.

The reflection was a combination of a class discussion about how the Mock Election went (their personal opinion, and group opinion), and a brief creative drawing activity linked with the Creative Cubby Building we’re undergoing. We went with “design the lawn/garden” this time, giving the students small strips of paper for them to write little word clouds on, using words from the day, and giving them space to draw lots of garden-related things on it.

We recruited some students to count the votes, while others took on the ‘scrutineering’ role for one particular party. The winning party was Party 3: Nature Party!

After the votes were counted up we conducted our class discussion, exploring various facets of the mock election, and the last 8 weeks. We discussed why the Nature Party won the election, and how the advertising through posters and videos might have been stronger for it, or weaker for the other parties. We discussed additional avenues we could have marketed our political parties, like social media campaigns, events, and running the advertising for longer periods of time, to get our messages out there.

While most aspects of the session went great, the videos the students had put together were a little lacklustre. This was largely due to minimal time being allocated to video creation and establishing better video-making techniques - we never really had a session to teach them how to make videos, we opted with letting them try to make the videos, then see the result of them through the election results. This is useful information though, as next term we’ll be taking them through more video work, so they’ll need some catchup sessions of filmmaking conventions and basics.

Giving the students a platform to explore politics by actually doing it (through the mock election) proved successful. The questions they asked and the points they raised at the end of the session showed a greater level of understanding of the political process, from a voter and party lens. At the start of this term they barely knew what I policy was, but during the end of class discussion they were happily chatting away about their policies they had developed and how they were marketed using the posters and other media.

End of term 2, we’ll be taking a little break to plan for the next term, and the students’ miniseries ideas.

We’ll be developing a long form plan for term 3, to ensure the students can work on their miniseries’ with better filmmaking knowledge. Likely a little more structured than this recent term, and with more discernible outcomes.

While only one class was taken through the Mock Election, many teachers from other areas (and one small group of student leaders) also cast their votes, and were able to engage with our project. I’m hoping to circulate the news of the winning party throughout the school community, and maybe influence some decision-making on improvements/upgrades to the school.