In our DBQ on women’s suffrage, we wanted the students to learn how image propaganda is used to make an argument or portray a side. Our generative questions were:
- What is the role of image media in the suffrage movement?
- How are pro-and anti-suffrage movements depicted in media?
- What are the biases that are found in image media?
- How are political, social, and economic factors portrayed in image media?
After doing this unit, the students should be able to look at a women’s suffrage image and answer the following questions (which connect back to the generative questions):
What side is this image from? (Pro-suffrage or anti-suffrage?)
What argument is the image making? How do you know?
What does this image say about the society at the time this image was printed?
Making the DBQ was a challenging assignment, mainly because we needed to find the best images that represented exactly the argument that we wanted. One of the problems was that, because there are so many images from the suffrage movement, there are often images that have different pictures but that make the same argument. We tried to be careful to choose images that did not just show a repeat of an argument, but that depicted a new suffrage position.
Our final project met all of the generative goals and objectives quite well. Each image asks the students to make a decision on the image’s argument and back up their answer with evidence, or it asks the students to compare the images to make a decision on how society had changed between the picture publications. The final DBQ is a great tool that can be used in conjunction with a social studies or communications class that is studying the suffrage movement in the United States. It can be found on the website Learnist, and soon in an iBook.
This DBQ is part of our class-produced, multi-touch iBook. Available free at iTunes