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Title	Follow up lesson plan - "Political Engagement" - Draft Edition 1 Index Introduction 1. Recap on key points form previous talk 2. Find your local federal politician 3. Find your local state politician 4. Find the federal environment and energy ministers 5. Find the federal shadow environment and energy ministers 6. Find the state shadow environment ministers 7. Find the state shadow environment and energy ministers 8. Find a mailing address for the Herald Sun, the Age and if they can the local newspapers 9. Write and address a letter Help Back to the Education Campaign Page
Introduction	Purpose The purpose of this follow up lesson to revisit some of the key points covered in the futureenergy.org talk given to your class, by under taking a practical activity of writing a letter to either a politician or a newspaper. Activity Overview Students will be asked to use the internet to find a series for postal addresses of politicians and newspapers. They will then write a letter to either a newspaper or a politician using information gained from the futureenergy.org talk and supplemented with information from our and other web sites. Key outcomes for students The key outcome is to get students to engage in the political process by writing a letter. A secondary outcome is to reinforce learning points from the futureenergy.org talk. A thirds outcome to to use internet search engines to research information. Learning Outcomes writing a letter; engagement in the political process; how to find a politician using the internet; and reinforcement of key climate change and energy issues. Requirements class room with computer facilities; a stamped envelop per student; paper and pen per student to write a letter on; and the lesson could run form one to two periods depending on how efficient students are at using the internet and how much time you want them to have to research and work on their letters. Assessed material If you feel the need to for the students to submit material for assessment as part of the lesson, I suggest each student / pair of students (depending on computer resources) submit a list of addresses base on activities 2-8 and each student submits a letter. In assessing letters the important point is encouragement of political engagement, and hence I feel grammar, presentation, detailed arguments should take second place behind honestly expressing their opinion about the issues. Writing a letter will be discussed more latter. Detailed lesson outline Below is a suggested lesson outline please modify to suit your own teaching style and points you wish to emphasise. Top
Activity 1.	Recap on talk 1. Introduce the lesson by saying this is a follow up activity to the futureenergy.org talk and outline the activities to be undertaken. 2. Give a quick overview of some of the key messages from the futureenergy.org talk, they are summarised below. a.Energy issues are important because of two key issues. i.Climate change. ii.The end of the age of oil. b.We are about to hit peak oil production within the next ten years are we will need to develop alternate mean of transport such as hydrogen and electric cars to avoid significant social and economic problems. c.Climate change is occurring now has been occurring for many years. It is very serious and is only going to get worse if we don't do something quickly. d.List some climate change problems, some that are occurring and now some that are going to occur (your choice). e.We can help reduce the effects of climate change by developing a sustainable energy future. f.There are two elements to a sustainable energy future, these are clean energy production and energy use reduction. g.A sustainable energy future can be implimented now with existing technology. h.However governments and industry are not acting fast enough and need to be encouraged. i.We can encourage them by purchasing green power and energy efficient products; or j.We can engage in the political process. 3. Explain again that the purpose to the days activities is to engaging in the political process by writing a letter and in doing so hopefully help save the planet. Top
Activity 2	Find your local federal politician Purpose: The purpose of this activity to to find your local federal politician, introduce the Australian Electoral Commission site and the Federal Parliament web site. Step 1: Students are encouraged to use internet search engines to try and find the local federal politicians. There are many ways to find a federal politician, some students may know their name, others may know which party they come from, some may know the name of the seat. Students or groups should work independently from each other. Give students five minutes or so to find their local politician. Find out who was successful, and encourage them to share their methods with the rest of the class. The futureenergy.org web site has a lot of links needed to complete his lesson however to purpose of the lesson is to train people to use find the addresses using other websites. If a student happens to work this out in the first bit of the lesson make sure they follow the paths outlined in the lesson in later parts of the lesson. Step 2: Now guide the students to the Australian Electoral Commission Site buy entering the name into the search engine and try and find it. If not the site is at www.aec.gov.au. Encourage them to have a look around for a couple of minutes. Them ask the students to finding their local member in this site. Guide if necessary. To find the local politician you will need to look at the "who" section. Once you have found the name of the electorate bring up the profile and map. Looking at the map will be vital in some cases as the same suburb may be split into two or three electorates. Once you find the profile look up the name of the sitting member and you will also see a link to their parliamentary page. Learning point: Once you have found your lower house seat take at look at how safe the seat is. This is expressed both as a percentage and a number of raw voters. Seats that are held by less than 4% are considered marginal. Explain that marginal seat are important to politicians as they are the seats that determines which party will win or loose the election. Step 3: Students will then need to find the political web site for their federal politician. Federal politicians can be found at the federal parliament website at www.aph.gov.au/house/members/index.htm Their are a number of ways students can get to their local members web page. Student should search on this site for their local politician's address and record it. Top
Activity 3.	Find your local state politician Now the students have found the federal politicians they will now try and find their local state politician. Purpose: The purpose of this activity is to find your local state politician, introduce the Victorian Electoral Commission site and the State Parliament web site. To practice the skills learn in activity 3. Step1: Take the students back to the AEC website and go to the link page to "Other electoral sites" under "How". Find the Victorian Electoral Commission Web Site (www.vec.vic.gov.au) and encourage the students to find their state politicians. At state level each voter has an upper house member and lower house member. The lower house seats preform a similar role as the federal house of representative seat, while the upper house seat is similar to the federal senate. The seat of a lower house member is called a division and the seat for an upper house member is called a province. The upper house system is changing at the next state elections. In this exercise we are interested in the lower house seats primarily, however if students choose to records the upper house members as their local member this is not a problem but they should be aware of the difference. It is a bit more hit and miss at the Victorian Electoral commission website to find you local politician and students will need to take guesses at which electorate is theirs and then check electorate maps till they find the right one. Step 2: Students now need to find an address for the the local politician so they can check the State parliament web site. Students may have worked out they can find the address by looking at the different political parties' web sites by now Hopefully having going through the first activity students will be able to complete this second activity own their own. Guide if necessary. Top
Activity 4.	Find the federal environment and energy ministers Purpose: The purpose of this activity is to find your federal environment and energy ministers and introduce the Federal Liberal Party website. Step 1: Ask / remind the students which political party is in government at the federal level. Get them to use an internet search engine to find the political party's web site. Search the party site to find the environment and energy ministers. Guide as needed. In 2006 Environment Day is on a Monday. Top
Activities 5, 6, 7.	5. Find the federal shadow environment and energy ministers. 6. Find the state environment and energy ministers. 7. Find the state shadow environment and energy ministers. Activities 5, 6, and seven are to some degree a repeat of activity 4. Top
Activity 8.	Find a mailing address for the Herald Sun, the Age and if they can your local newspaper Purpose: The purpose of this activity is to find addresses to mail a letter to the newspapers. Step 1: Ask / remind the students what are the names of the two major news papers in Melbourne and their local paper(s). Get them to use an internet search engine to find these addresses. Top
Activity 9.	Write and address a letter Purpose: The purpose of this activity is engage in the political process by writing a letter to the to a politician or a newspaper and tell them what you think. Step 1: The students should choose one of the addresses found to write a letter. They should then construct a letter using material from the futureenergy.org talk and our and other websites. The letters do not need to be long. One page is enough. The most important thing to to communicate what the students think and feel about climate change and implementing a sustainable energy future. Learning point: The thing that interests politicians the most is to understand what the voters are actually thinking. Top
Help	Need help? Any questions please contact myself (adrian) by emailing me at adrian@futureenergy.org. In your interested in helping stop climate change and ensure a sustainable energy future, Futureenergy.org would love your support. Top

Last Updated: 11/9/04 by @1