Living Room Candidate – A remarkable exhibit from the Museum of the Moving Image, this archive includes many of the television ads run in presidential campaigns since 1952. From Eisenhower forward through Daisy, The Bear and all the way up to Will.I.am saying Yes We Can.

One way to assign is to provide direct links to a series of ads and invite students to compare and contrast or find common themes and techniques. Another is to analyze one year’s ads and pull out the conversation that takes place through ads over the campaign season.

If you have used commercials with your students before, please leave a note sharing what you used, how you used it, and what worked well. Thanks!

Created by professor Jerry Goldman, Oyez is a remarkable archive of  Supreme Court arguments. All of them.

From the site:

“The Oyez Project is a multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work. It aims to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. The Project also provides authoritative information on all justices and offers a virtual reality ‘tour’ of portions of the Supreme Court building, including the chambers of some of the justices.”

The story behind the archive is fascinating.

You can provide students with a link directly to a specific case such as this one to Roe v. Wade. And in some cases you can point students directly to a particular section of the recording. Transcripts are provided, fully searchable. And with all the data provided you can make data-sifting assignments such as finding out who the swing vote was last year and how many cases are ultimately decided by this one justice.

APSA’s annual Teaching and Learning Conference stands apart as a unique conference in many ways, which result in
1) a gathering of people serious about teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning and
2) relatively long term commitments to a a group of less than 40 people (per themed track) which permits real conversation over the three day event. I highly recommend it.

This year, we had the privilege of presenting a Workshop entitled “10 Things You Couldn’t Do 10 Years Ago.” Stepping back to ask that question and then finding meaningful answers makes me quite grateful to be participating in this space and time.

Moving forward, we plan to continue the presentation in an open-ended format, sharing the best links we’ve seen for people teaching in the political science classroom. We hope you find these links useful in your own class. And if we’re overlooking a good one, please do send it our way and we’ll get it out to those in search of such links.

Thanks,
David & the crew at Soomo