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Using Current Events in AP Government & Politics Courses
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by Ken Wedding
Northfield, Minnesota
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A Full Semester
Whenever I prepare to present a workshop for AP teachers, I browse through the Course Description to refresh my memory of exactly what the course outline demands of our students (and of us). If I pay close attention, I can almost recreate the near panic feelings I had the first time I prepared to teach the course. Was I really going to be able to teach all this in one semester? When I realized that I would also have to teach about events and people outside of the textbook, my anxiety increased.
Then I realized that those current events could be valuable examples of generalities scattered throughout the textbook and the course description. The AP Government & Politics course is not a current events course, but being able to use journalistic accounts of political events is a valuable addition to our teaching repertoires.
Finding and Choosing the Right Events
Which events and which accounts are most valuable? For me, these are accounts that supplement a concept or a theme from the students' text readings. For example, Wilson and DiIulio describe four types of policy making in their textbook, American Government (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). It's possible to find articles about each type. An article about Social Security can illustrate Wilson and DiIulio's "majoritarian" issues; an article about defining standards for high definition television can illustrate their "interest group" category; an article about pork barrel projects illustrates "client politics"; and an article about reducing CO2 pollution might illustrate "entrepreneurial politics."
It's not always possible to find all the articles I want to use at the time I'm teaching a specific topic, so I collect news stories year-round. I file them by topics on my course outline. And when I go through the file to choose good examples, I throw out the older materials. My experience suggests that the period from August to December is the best time to find useful articles. Congress is returning to work and dealing with budgets, election campaigns are heating up, and the media is looking for political issues after the summer.
Similarly, Schmidt, Shelley, and Bardes, in their book American Government and Politics Today (Thomson Wadsworth, 2003), describe five roles for the president of the United States (chief of state, chief executive, commander in chief, chief diplomat, and chief legislator). Using a transcript of the most recent State of the Union speech, you could ask students to identify which role the president was playing in each topic covered by the speech.
Another example during presidential election campaigns is to look for articles based on Allan J. Lichtman's "Keys to the White House." Lichtman claims that his 13 keys have accounted for the winners in every presidential election since 1860 -- except for the election of 2000. He's already published his prediction of George W. Bush's reelection. Since Lichtman's 13 keys cover such a broad range of topics, I'd assign a topic to each student, asking them to find reports to verify or contradict each of the keys.
Current Opinion and Analysis
My purpose in all of these exercises is to closely tie the consideration of current events to an essential part of the course. Another way to do this is to look for opinion pieces and analysis articles that go beyond straightforward reporting of events.
In their textbook Government by the People (Prentice Hall, 2002), James MacGregor Burns and his colleagues suggest that one of the "most fascinating aspects of Washington politics is the way policy activists in government and nongovernmental organizations . . . join forces." (p. 427) Over the course of a couple weeks, we can count on George Will, David Broder, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Sowell, William Safire, Thomas Friedman, Molly Ivins, and others to write things about just that "fascinating" aspect of Washington politics. Considered alongside Burns's suggestion, these essays can do much to illuminate important aspects of the AP curriculum.
In the end, I don't think the inclusion of current events in an AP course is an added burden. It's a valuable teaching tool, because it offers ways to apply and test the contentions of textbook authors and to engage the interest of students naturally concerned about the way government is actually run and politics are actually played. Both will help students learn.
Ken Wedding is a consultant to the College Board and a regular contributor to the AP Government & Politics Electronic Discussion Group. He began teaching AP Government & Politics: U.S. and Comparative in 1986, reading exams in 1992, and co-moderating the electronic discussion group at its inception. He's also the author of three books on teaching political science, most recently The AP Comparative Government and Politics Examination: What You Need to Know (Capstone Publications, 2003).
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