Peter Pappas

There are so many great elements to the Who Gets to Vote unit. Being a teacher educator, I decided to adapt the first and third lessons for my Master’s in Teaching / Social Studies students. It took about one hour to teach. Teaching virtually over Zoom, here was my procedure:

1. Open with them brainstorming on a shared Jamboard “What should be the requirements for voting in the United States?”
2. Then, brainstorm some categories of people who have been targeted with voter suppression.
3. I broke the class into 3 groups and asked them to brainstorm regulations that would suppress targeted groups of voters.
4. The mixer role play was next. I had prepared a condensed list of roles and assigned one to each student.
5. Students met in breakout groups to discuss their roles and how any of our new regulations impacted their right to vote.
6. Session ended with an open discussion of what they’ve heard on the subject of voter suppression in the 2020 cycle.

My students were deeply engaged throughout the lesson and it generated much discussion. It was interesting for them to consider some of the suppression techniques done by different groups and the extent to which they were based on real-world examples.