Activity Six

This activity is to accompany Unit One of the Curriculum Guide.

Incorporating the C.E.Ls:

• Independent Learning
• Critical & Creative Thinking
• Communications
• Numeracy

Concepts Development Lesson for:

• Ideology
• Legitimacy
• Change

This concept development lesson provides students with an opportunity to respond to a variety of contemporary issues and to correlate their response with a political ideology. This activity allows the students to identify where they are on the political spectrum.

Knowledge Objectives

The student will:

• know that ideologies are similar to paradigms;
• know that ideologies share common characteristics:
  • a set of assumptions,
  • an interpretation and explanation of the past and present,
  • a vision of the future and strategy to achieve that vision, and
  • a simple believable picture of reality.
• know that each ideology will define what it considers a legitimate social contract.
• know that an ideology will define the relationship of the individual to the society in terms of needs and rights.

Skills Development

The student will:

• practise working with a classification system that organizes data into a system.
• practise defining the main parts.
• practise describing how the parts of a whole are related to each other.
• learn using attack skills to find order in what might seem to be random responses.

Values Issues

The student will:

• discuss the consequences of applying a particular paradigm to various social and political issues; and
• discuss how the various ideological paradigms would affect the rights of individuals and the collective rights of society.

Outline of the Activity

Step One

The Student Information Sheet: Issues in Canadian Society lists a number of controversial issues about which society must reach a consensus.

• There are five different responses for each issue. One is an example of an extreme right wing response, another a conservative response, a liberal, a socialist and a communist response.
• Have the students go through the various issues and select the one response with which they most agree. (Note: it is important that students understand that the various responses may not fit their own opinion perfectly, but that they should select the one that comes closest.)

Have the students look for a pattern to their responses by checking whether most of their responses tend to come from one column or from one area of the sheet.

• If they find that their responses are widely scattered, ask them to priorize the issues in order of importance to them. That is which ones they feel very concerned about and which they have no strong feelings about. Then have them check again to see if there is a pattern in their responses to the issues of high concern.

(Unimportant issues will often be more scattered because students will feel less concerned about the consequences of their choices and therefore freer to be unconventional).

Once they have determined a pattern to their answers, distribute the Student Information Sheet: The Political Spectrum. This will help them correlate their responses to the above issues with a political ideology and give them an idea of where they are on the political spectrum.