Hey folks, Randy’s back with another awesome blog. I’m here today to reflect on the first project of the year. “Don’t be a DICtator!”. In this political project, we explored the stories of dictators in the 20th century and ended this project with our authoritative party speech. The driving question for this project is, “How can we use a speech to explore the threat posed by authoritarian rule?”
This short project comprises three keystones, which can be simplified down to research, analyze, and recreate. The research phase was the most critical part, building our understanding of authoritarianism and dictatorship. Through investigating different vocabularies and fundamental ideologies, we gained a deeper understanding of what dictatorship is all about, how they gained power, and how they maintained their reign. To learn about all the dictators in the 20th century, each student completed research on a dictator that was assigned to them and shared it with the class. My dictator was Fidel Castro, and here is my research:
Click here
If everyone knew that dictatorship was bad, then why does it still occur? Most importantly, why are people attracted to authoritarianism? In Keystone 2, we learned more about the psychology of authoritarianism and how dictators manipulate people’s minds into trusting them. We’ve discovered that authoritarian leaders use fear and confusion to destabilize the population to gain control. They often target a national threat and promote the uprise of nationalism. These patterns occur over and over again throughout history, such as Donald Trump blaming China for COVID-19 and Hitler blaming the Jewish people for their broken economy after WW1. These patterns helped us to recognize the tactics of a “successful” dictator.
Research on authoritarian psychology
After learning about the history, it’s time to repeat it. We paired up in twos and created our authoritative parties. Keenan and I decided to have a party called the Neo-CCP located in Japan. We brainstormed our core principles and did lots of research on the current CCP. We created a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your dictatorship society, including the strategies that have worked in the past and innovations inspired by the internet. Here is the slideshow:
To complement our slideshows, each group prepared a political debate/speech between the democratic defender and the authoritarian dictator. Keenan and I prepared some questions beforehand based on Japan’s current issue and prepared scripts to answer those questions. You can check them out here:
After being assessed by the grade 11s, we missed some factors while preparing our presentation. First, we should’ve memorized our scripts; after all, it was supposed to be a debate. As usual, Keenan was quite monotone, and the grade 11s did not hesitate to critique that. Most importantly, we didn’t use enough rhetoric within our speeches. For our first project in grade 12, it was a great adjustment project to get us back on track. Although this first learning attempt is not the most successful, the next one will be!
Stay tuned for the winter exhibition!