Discussing the end of World War I and the inter-war years of the 1920s and 1930s, we introduce seven distinct systems as we move through the various topics of the course. I wanted to pull those together … and then pull them apart again. To wit:
The groups chose a narrator to cover #1 and #2, while the remaining group members did the skit. This was my first time doing skits with sophomores, and so I was slightly nervous — but needlessly, as it turned out. Their skits were very good; that is, they highlighted distinct characteristics of their assigned system in a memorable way.
After all seven groups had presented, I asked each group to discuss among themselves which from the list were political systems and which were economic systems, and then hey had to identify which from the list had been used by the USSR:
This was a bit tougher because (a) they didn’t quite know what to do with Totalitarianism, and (b) there was argument over whether the USSR had been “capitalist” during the New Economic Policy era. We pulled it back together in a class-wide conversation to go over those points.
All in all, this was a good 25-minute learning activity.