MAP 10 takes on their fall semester final: MAPlandia

Courtesy of Carla Villela

Anarchism group performing their rally.

The stage was set as King Louie of MAPlandia attempted to relinquish his throne, demonstrating his love for his people by allowing them all to vote for a new leader. 

For Anjali Sahni of the Utilitarianism party, this meant spreading her ideologies of the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people, as an attempt to promote her selected candidate, Peter Faraone as ruler of MAPlandia with utilitarianism values. 

“My group worked extremely hard trying to promote Peter Faraone as leader, we made a promotional video, T-Shirts with his face on it and choreographed dances and sang and rapped with live music, such as a piano,” Sahni said.

MAP sophomores were split into nine groups, each team representing a different political ideology, and they attempted to promote their selected candidate for the position of the king. This project, rebranded this year as MAPlandia, was the final project for the fall semester for the class.

MAPlandia was for years known as Daveyland after history teacher Mike Davey, and its goal was to teach the different types of European politics in the 19th century. This year, Davey left MAP 10 for MAP 11, and he passed on the tradition. Following the addition of new MAP 10 teachers, Carla Villela and Toby Remmers along with veteran English teacher Marcos Cortez, Daveyland then became MAPlandia.

MAP 10 was divided into nine groups, who were each assigned a different “ism”: anarchism, conservatism, democratic socialism, liberalism, nationalism, radicalism, romanticism, scientific socialism and utilitarianism. Each group elected one historical figure for their group to promote and represent their assigned “ism.”

Daveyland originally focused mainly on history, but MAPlandia additionally explored media and English: Students were required to include features of media, such as films or posters, and several different persuasive writing techniques such as propaganda and rhetorical appeals.

Each group had a 10- to 11-minute limit for their rally to promote their candidate using speeches, videos, skits, dances and songs. Groups crafted a speech that included persuasion techniques learned in English, and they could add live music and dance to make their rally more entertaining. Some groups danced while others played the electric guitar and piano. 

The groups were also allowed to criticize other “isms” and candidates to make their own group seem superior. Groups used speeches, raps and campaign videos.  

“I never knew how much went into political campaigning and how effective propaganda can be,” said Krishna Shandiliya, the candidate of the conservatism group.  

MAPlandia also encourages students to explore political messaging. The projects include propaganda and students synthesize different subjects of history, English and media arts to create an effective campaign. 

“As we’re heading into an election year, our political campaigns currently involve very persuasive techniques, which I want students to be able to identify and respond to,” Cortez said. “Students should be able to disseminate information to mass audiences, as well as areas in which false information is presented, at times, dangerous language, discourse and ideologies are being spread.”

Cortez emphasized the importance of being able to understand different propaganda in politics and the news.  He wanted his students to not only gain writing skills, but also an improved ability of identifying false information. 

 “It’s much easier to recognize propaganda used in politics and other public speaking in the real world now that I have some classroom experience with it,” said Alexandra Soozani, who was part of the Romanticism group.

MAPlandia was also a competition, whichever group the teachers decided was most persuasive won. 

This year, however, was the first time the students had any say in their group selection. Each student was provided a form before group selections in which they named at least ten students they believe they would work well with. Students ended up in groups containing anywhere from zero to four people they requested to be paired up with. This gave students the opportunity to expand their comfort zones and make new friends.  Through this process, the Nationalist group was selected as the winners of the first MAPlandia.

“I’ve gained a lot of collaborative skills. I was able to work in a large group of people that I otherwise wouldn’t have worked with, and I also obtained a new perspective into some of the historical things that we’ve been learning and ways to implement the concepts we learned in English class,” Soozani said.