Our 8th grade social studies teacher, Sara Baquero-Garcia, is a font of knowledge when it comes to propaganda. Having been impressed by her students’ Animal Farm projects, and by helping her find resources for another part of the project, I decided to interview her about her overall propaganda coverage with the 8th grade. Her wide-ranging explanations covered many different types of propaganda, how they interlink with each other and with the modern world, some aspects of the projects, and more.
For length, I have divided the post into two, with the first covering project background and types of propaganda. Part two, coming in June, will cover her Animal Farm project, and offer a student’s insights into the project and what she learned.
Now, on to part one!
Project Purpose
Sara’s propaganda project evolved from wanting students to “explore the media around them,” the images and messages they see and hear every day. What do these images and messages mean? What do they omit? “Those things that are not said are often the most important ones,” says Sara. “And if they are said, how are they being said?” Digging deeper, she wants students to consider “how we come to believe what we believe, and how we come to assume the things we assume.” The goal is for students to “become critical thinkers, so that they can make their own conclusions.”
Project Background
Sara has been teaching propaganda for decades, starting at The American School in Japan, in the 1990s. “We were revamping our curriculum at the time, and I had the freedom to do this media literacy project,” she says. In the 1990s, “in Tokyo you could walk anywhere and it was like you were bombarded by Times Square type of visuals,” which at once brought propaganda to mind and inspired the unit. Sara used to teach it as a two-month unit, which she felt was “totally worth it,” but the kids got propaganda-ed out. That prompted her, over time, to “separate the parts of the project” and run different parts “when they are beneficial for whatever we’re talking about.” It’s a “mammoth” project, so a one-block lesson was never going to suffice!
One non-negotiable part of any project Sara does is student choice. “The kid has absolute choice within the resources that we either give them, or that they find in something that they are connected to,” she says. “That is crucial.” While assigning a broad topic, like a big news event, for an initial activity is fine, “it should never be the piece that they have to do” for the main part of the project. Says Sara, “I think it’s really important to give them agency. And as they’re looking for their favorite piece, they’re looking at so much more, and so that’s where the research can be super rewarding for them. …They’re starting to think through the lens of the researcher.” They are doing the analyzing Sara looks for, and focusing on something of interest helps them “really zero in” on not just that topic, but on propaganda in general.
Types of Propaganda
Ideally Sara addresses four types of propaganda: political, commercial, news, and entertainment. While each might have different purposes, they use similar strategies students can recognize in any situation. “I usually use twelve techniques [of propaganda], not because they’re the only techniques, but because they’re ubiquitous,” Sara says. She asks her students to “really reflect” on the common elements inside these techniques. Here is Sara’s general description of the project itself, and, here is the list of the techniques Sara uses with the students.
Political Propaganda
Political propaganda is often the natural starting point. Because of the fall election cycle, Sara tends to start the year with politics. “That’s a great time to explore the topic of political propaganda and the effect that it has on the electorate,” she says. “You’re looking at the campaign process. You’re looking at how people vote. You’re looking at the system of gerrymandering. …There’s so many things to look at when you think of campaigns,” including “how propaganda connects to our understanding of politics.”
For researching this aspect of the project, Sara relies on some resources we post on her class LibGuide, like The Living Room Candidate—”The absolute best source for presidential campaigns.” She also makes use of local advertisements and mail-delivered pamphlets. One year, Sara had her students study major initiatives on the ballot, one initiative per group. They examined pros and cons, viewpoints from either side, etc. By the end, she felt that in addition to having a “blast” doing the project, “these kids knew more about those initiatives than any adult that you would ask out in the street.” Sara liked watching how they came “to the understanding that you don’t need this flashy situation of presidential campaign in order to be engaged within the system of what’s happening in that election.”
Another way she approaches political propaganda is the historical context, which she finds vital because it shows “the power of political propaganda.” She says, “Of course, you can’t do a historical propaganda examination without looking at the Nazi propaganda of World War II, and the campaign[s] against Jews,” Communists, Romani, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, etc. “The intensity of what that meant with the eventual Holocaust.”
For students, Sara wants them to explore questions like, “How could I, a normal every day German citizen, come to believe that it’s OK for [my] Jewish neighbor to just disappear? How does one get to that? How do people get to a place of complacency with the status quo when something like that is happening around you?” She turns facile answers, like “they were evil” or “they were ignorant” or “they didn’t know,” back on the students. “How are we complacent, or how are we ignorant, or how are we unaware, or how are we being brainwashed?”
To help answer these questions, Sara recalls to students the techniques of propaganda, which include fear and scapegoating. “Did the Nazis use fear? Absolutely—they had a whole movie of connecting Jewish citizens with rats,” she reminds students. “And that film made people so afraid of even being touched by a Jewish person, so then it became OK to separate Jewish kids in Jewish schools, and to not have Jewish colleagues at your job, because they were equated by the propaganda as vermin.” “Being told again and again to believe in something can have a powerful effect on the receiver of the information, and if people in power are the ones giving the information, it can be a very powerful tool in convincing people to follow an ideology without thinking critically. That is always a dangerous result and that is a major reason for students to learn how to question what is being told to students through propaganda.”
Commercial Propaganda
Sara tends to do commercial propaganda at a time that coincides with Christmas, “because we have so commercialized that holiday. I want kids to examine what they have, what they want, what they’re asking for, how their behavior as consumers has been shaped by propaganda, by commercials, by trends, by social media.” She calls those messages out for using “the same propaganda techniques” they’ve studied before, “to get us to thinking some way.” Especially Sara pinpoints influencers telling students “what they should look like and what they should buy and what’s cool.” She wants to get the students thinking about the cycle of trends like Stanley Cups, which were cool but now are not. “Every trend requires an expenditure, and every expenditure is benefiting someone,” Sara says, “benefiting some company or some business, and there’s things attached to that.”
If her time is limited for covering commercial propaganda, Sara might have her students look at commercials through the lens of the techniques used by political propaganda. For example, the fear technique used by the Nazis to target Jews gets used by commercials through the threat of being uncool or not accepted if you don’t have, for example, a Stanley Cup. Or the technique of promised happiness as shown by, say, Coca-Cola commercials. “You look at a Coca-Cola commercial and…everything is glittery. You know it’ll be better to be happier with Coca-Cola, right?”
Sara adds, “a commercial needs to do two things: it needs to give you what you should want, but it also needs to give you why you should want it and how not having it makes you less happy, less whole, less..something. The goal is to always make you feel less, unless you purchase whatever it is the commercial wants you to have.” When Sara sets the students free to look at commercials, “they can’t believe that the teacher is OK with them looking at commercials; how fun is that?” But through the laughter and sharing, they also start to analyze and think. “So having that fun session where they’re looking at all of these fun things, it’s not a waste of time; it’s actually helping them really zero in, and where they are in that part in that culture.”
Says Sara, “for most kids, what’s really interesting,” after they start studying commercial propaganda, “is that now they have the vocabulary to speak to what is happening to them. What are the influences happening to them?” Once they have the vocabulary, and that “intricate understanding,” students can say something like, “Wow, I did not realize that they were using XYandZ to get to me.” This also gives students the tools to understand what types of propaganda work best on them personally, as well as the understanding that “most successful pieces that use propaganda use more than one technique” for that reason—to appeal to many different people.
A tie-in for this part of the project is Annie Leonard’s video The Story of Stuff, which explores the system that brings us material products. It covers the process from extraction to manufacturing to disposal, including everything and everyone affected at each point along the way. Sara points out that Leonard, being an environmentalist, approaches the topic from a negative point of view—”commercialism can be really bad because it’s killing the environment.”
Then she shows students the other side of the coin through documentaries made by a media executive from the 1960s. These show “how industry is so great for jobs,” the economy, and taxes, “and we’re civilized, and we have all these amazing things, and…everything is looking hunky-dory because we now have skyscrapers.” As Sara shows the students, this media executive shows “the power of propaganda in a very positive way… It gets us to be civilized. It gets us to make the better product. It gets us to be able to choose the better product because now we know about it.” The video is called: Advertisement, What’s it Doing to Your Life” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz_q4PxZFxA
After watching both videos, students must “choose one product that [they] have purchased….and [then] look at six of eight components that are not a part of what the commercial told them.” This work takes the students two to three weeks, because they must really dig into it. Often, “It’s really hard to find information…[for example], you know Nike isn’t going to tell you where the plastic for your shoes came from.” Sara urges the students to think laterally in those cases. “When you have plastic manufacturing, where is it usually done?”
Thus, students learn “to infer from research into industries, research into health scenes, research into…the commercial aspect of it. Research into labor issues with the company or the product or the materials, issues with resources and where they come from.” Sara adds, “There’s a variety of things you can do, and then that’s where I’m really excited about it, because kids are seeing the big picture.” They are seeing, “Oh, every time I purchase something I’m making a choice of what to support, and it’s a minute choice, but I’m not the only one making it.” As Sara says, there are “thousands, perhaps millions of people, making that same choice,” and that’s where the power of commercial propaganda comes in.
News Propaganda
“With news,” Sara teaches, it’s “really important to differentiate between fake news and media bias, because fake news is fake news…it’s not true. But media bias is that much more powerful because it is ‘true,’ but it is also biased.” Think of how someone like [Dan Rather] on CBS would report on the Gulf War differently than someone like Wolf Blitzer on CNN. [Rather] might report, “At such and such time, this happened.” Whereas Blitzer might report “with the visuals, and the drama of the droppings, and…precise hits.” From this, Sara says, the viewer knows “this is terrible,” and now he’s adding “a lot more information that is or isn’t validated, but it’s what CNN is telling you.” She wants students to think, “OK, what in that is factual, and what is interpretation of what’s happening?”
This is the struggle, she says, “with all media right now….There’s so much of a blur between what is…news factual versus interpretation.” And once interpretation is involved, so is bias, “because we’re all interpreting in some way…leaving some things behind and highlighting others.” Sara wants students to explore the question of, “why do we do that?” Also questions like, “Who is behind that interpretation? Is there a company that doesn’t want you to highlight one thing or another? Is there a government telling you to highlight this? Is there a boss that has interest in XYZ and doesn’t want those interests to be harmed by the [news] piece?” She adds, “Or maybe it’s just bad reporting” by people who “have no idea what they’re doing, or maybe it’s an AI bot…the news has become such a mire…” Students getting their news from social media is a case in point. Says Sara, that’s even more biased, and the algorithms set your news on repeat “so you’re totally missing these other parts.”
When Sara addresses media propaganda, students work with the same propaganda techniques, “but now it’s really important to look at different media outlets, and how they’re reporting the same event.” She assigns students to choose a current news story and explore the ways different media outlets report the same story. “What is common and what is different?” One visual she’s appreciated using is the [Fontes] Media Bias Chart, “which is a fantastic visual.” Once students understand how much bias exists in media, they “explore how the reporting of that affected the outcomes politically, and/or, at the moment. So it’s all connected.”
Entertainment Propaganda
Entertainment propaganda, Sara says, may be “the most powerful type when it comes to culture. What kind of culture do we create? What kind of community do we build, and how does that community of that culture get built?” It’s about “why we do the things we do as people.” As an example, she mentions teen slang, like the now-ubiquitous “bro.” “Where did that come from?” she asks. “Who started that?” And why? The same goes for the “67” phenomenon. “Kids went crazy, and nobody knows what it means, but everybody’s having fun…so it becomes a part of that cultural trend.”
As Sara says, we live through trends like the “ice challenge” without ascertaining “how that came to us and why we follow it.” She wants her students to examine past entertainment and trends that derived from books or songs, and now social media. “Where do kids get [the idea] they should… eat Tide Pods?” she asks. “How does a kid get to choose to do that?” The students might say, “Oh, it’s fun,” but “why was it fun? …What made you think that that was fun?” The entertainment realm is particularly prone to people posting and reposting pieces, because they think the pieces are fun or funny, or they “wanted to be part of the fun.”
Moving on from trends, Sara looks at the multiplicity of messages in films and songs, like Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education…” or the Beatles “Imagine all the people.” What do those songs mean? Or, what is a movie like The Matrix telling us to “think about ourselves, the future, the place of technology, what to fear, what to not fear?” Every song, movie, book, etc. “has a message.” Sara wants kids “to explore critically, what are those messages? How do they affect you?”
Despite its importance, though, Sara often “sadly” lacks the time to cover entertainment propaganda as fully as it deserves.
Librarian’s Note
Our library team has long had the privilege of supporting Sara’s work by helping curate resources for her project LibGuide and collaborating on source evaluation strategies with her students. These kinds of partnerships—between teachers and librarians—strengthen students’ ability to think critically about the information landscape they navigate every day.
Stay tuned in June for information about Sara’s Animal Farm project, and student insights!
Note: I used Flint for light copy-editing, drafting the transition between the two parts, and the conclusion in part two. Everything else is human-written, and it’s all human-edited!
