This is an anti-fascist lesson for the week leading up to the potential election of a fascist leader of a major European country. Although in some teaching contexts political content is discouraged, engaging with questions of power and society is one way of allowing your students to develop their rhetorical skills, and also a means of encouraging a sense of group unity and shared purpose at a time of increasing division and social atomization.
It’s possible that you have a fascist or two in your class. Let’s hope not. This lesson isn’t designed for them, but who cares. Maybe they can leave the classroom and go and troll Twitter instead. It aims to enable your normal students to engage politically on an international level through the medium of English. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, don’t do the lesson, but it’s worth bearing in mind that a) English is not just a language for conducting trade, presenting innovative product ideas, etc and also b) if fascists such as Le Pen triumph your livelihood as teacher of a globalising language will be under threat and a lot of your students (and your friends, your family and you) will end up exiled, in jail, dead, or guarding concentration camps for a living.
The lesson as designed is 75 minutes long and should work well for high Upper Int/B2.2 upwards. I did it on Tuesday with a B2-ish class of Political Science students and it worked wonderfully.
Lesson procedure
1. Write on the board ‘fascism’. Ask what it is. Elicit names of famous fascists but also ideas about how to define it. Offer no definitions of your own. (5 mins)
2. In pairs students write their own definition of fascism. (5 mins)
3. Now look at the one on Wikipedia. Do your students agree? How would they change it? (5 mins)
4. On their phones or together as a class, edit the definition on Wikipedia (NB. your/their definition(s) will be rejected almost immediately, but you don’t need to tell them that.) (10 mins)
5. In small groups students address the following
Questions for discussion:
Do you know any fascists personally?
What would you do if a friend of yours started talking about:
- Voting for a fascist candidate?
- Joining a fascist organisation?
Have friends on or off social media been talking about the French election?
What would you say to a French friend who was talking about voting Le Pen?
(10 mins including brief report back from each brief pair on what was briefly said – don’t let this bit drag on. Make it brief.)
6. Half the students read Article A, half Article B. They take notes on the MAIN points (stress this and jog them along if they get stuck on details – with less strong groups tell them to just read the first seven or eight paragraphs), check difficult vocab and compare with a partner who’s read the same article. (15 mins)
7. Students swap partners and share what they learnt, taking notes on other person’s article. (10 mins)
8. Share and clarify the meaning of vocab they learnt on the board. (5 mins)
9. Students imagine they have a French friend who has been posting pro-Le Pen stuff online. They write an email to their friend telling them what they think. Depending on their level you could instruct them to use a certain number of conditional sentences (‘if Le Pen wins’, etc). Be on hand to offer vocab and grammar suggestions, etc. They then share what they wrote with a partner, asking for constructive suggestions, etc (20 mins)
10. For homework students write a second draft and then email it to you for corrections, etc.
C’est tout. Nique les fachos!
Infinite Coincidence 