‘Daveyland’ teaches MAP students about campaigning

MAP students learn more about campaign through mock election.

After an entire Media Arts Program (MAP) period of rallying for election candidates and presenting speeches to potential voters, history teacher Mike Davey, acting as the former king of Daveyland, stepped up to the podium on Oct. 26.

Building up suspense and raising up a paper with the winner’s name, Davey announced the winners of the month-long mock election: sophomores David Berkowitz-Sklar, Sora Ebrahimi, Ashley Feng, David Koh, Sirisha Munukutla and Kiana Steele, a team who represented the Liberals.

“It was great to know that our speeches actually had an impact on our peers and that we were able to get our message across after so many weeks of hard work,” said Berkowitz-Sklar, who played the role of the candidate for the group.

A yearly tradition for all MAP sophomores, Daveyland is a mock presidential election. Students are required to side with their assigned political party and conduct election campaigns over the course of a month.

“We had a bunch of different groups with different ideas coming through like conservatism, communism and nationalism, and we all tried to elect a new leader,” sophomore Sasha Pickard said.

By designing logos, learning about political parties and applying propaganda techniques in their speeches, students combined the curricula of all three MAP classes — Media Arts 1, World History and English 10 MAP — to complete the project.

“Daveyland has really challenged my skills in all three classes of MAP,” Berkowitz-Sklar said. “Each class was really involved and pushed my knowledge of the subject.”

Daveyland has not only helped MAP students develop their media arts skills, but also taught them how presidential election campaigning works.

“Campaigning was tough because we had to make our candidate appealing to the mass population by finding them an angle that was as relatable as possible to the general,” sophomore Isaiah Vivero said. “But overall, Daveyland has been a really good learning experience and a project that I’ll definitely remember from MAP.”