Making A Manifesto

I’m always keeping up on what’s new in the world of visual text – be it kinetic typography, gifwordle, tagxedo and loads of other similar applications. They are truly something valuable for us educators – allowing us to add context to text and help students learn words, sentences, language.

Today I was looking at one of my fav manifestos –

It got me thinking that wouldn’t it be a great writing exercise, a great self-expression exercise, if students were to write their own manifestos or even better rewrite/remix the manifestos of others?

I put together this slideshow of examples of other manifestos out there. Download the PDF  or PPT. It would be a great activity to use one of these for a lesson or use them all to provide inspiration for students to make/write their own manifesto about a topic on poster A3 paper.

Also, students might get inspired by this presentation in Gif – My Manifesto.

A great idea and would love to hear from teachers who’ve tried this or something similar!  I will have to think about making a visual version of my own manifesto of art: Gagaism.

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ddeubel

Teacher trainer, technology specialist, educational thinker...creator of EFL Classroom 2.0, a social networking site for thousands of EFL / ESL teachers and students around the world.

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7 Responses

  1. Chris says:

    Just had to say I loved this post. I’m sure I can find applications for this in the future.

  2. ddeubel says:

    Hi Chris,

    Great that it “hit you”. A lot of being a great language teacher (rather than can be good at times, stick to the book type of teacher) is seeing the inherent language learning possibilities in the every day materials around us. Cookbooks, newsletters, origami etc….. I take pleasure in approaching teaching as a creative endeavor and think a lot of teachers do too. Cheers.

  3. Meg Fox says:

    Fantastic lesson plan–I’m starting a unit on political art with my grade 7 & 8 Exploring the Arts students, and their first step is going to be identifying a social-political issue they’re passionate about and creating a manifesto for awareness and for change.

  4. ddeubel says:

    Glad you like it! Thanks for dropping in and connecting. It’s a simple and super lesson indeed. Just inspire them with the examples then see what they can do. Cheers!

  5. Ken says:

    I have been working on the concept of student-made manifestos for university students in Japan for many years. I have adapted this idea to students of different language levels, for term-length courses as well as short two-day activities. The base of this enterprise is to have students construct statements concerning their values, share their value statements with everyone and find degrees of agreement.

  6. ddeubel says:

    It’s powerful stuff Ken. If your students are strong at using tech – I recommend a new online tool – Zanifesto. Really has a nice template for a manifesto and that is easy to produce and export / print. http://zanifesto.com/

  7. Danielle says:

    I’m working on a similar project with my students and stumbled across your post. How did it go? Also, my 2 cents- canva.com would be a great tool to use as well!

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