Mallory and I created a podcast collection covering Richard Nixon and the Watergate event. The podcasts include many calls to/from Richard Nixon by friends and colleagues consoling him during the predicament he was in. The collection also includes a podcast from a congressional hearing that is investigating the event. The students could use this collection to help put a human face on an event that is very confusing and embarrassing in U.S. history. Using these interviews the students will better understand the final days of Nixon's presidency, as well as hearing Nixon on the phone in a personal atmosphere. Other resources that can be used to accompany this lesson could be from supreme court decisions covering executive power, and perhaps other presidents that may have overstepped their bounds. Resources that discuss our government's checks and balances could also be used by the students to connect why Watergate was such an important issue that had to be exposed. This lesson would be perfect for a civics class discussing the limits of power each branch, in this case the executive, have to protect us from shady practices. One web site that can be used to look up Supreme court cases would be this one here. The following links are from our collection. (For some reason I could not directly link these podcasts.)
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/americanpublicmedia.org.1349949535.01357471251.1355019026?i=1426120683
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/americanpublicmedia.org.1349949535.01357471251.1355019026?i=1426120683
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/americanpublicmedia.org.1349949535.01357471251.1357014222?i=1766028534
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/americanpublicmedia.org.1349949535.01357471251.1356949900?i=1208012496
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/americanpublicmedia.org.1357552105?i=1876981101
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/americanpublicmedia.org.1349360431.01349360438.1351818005?i=1697554405
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Watergate is an issue that almost everyone has heard of, but very few people understand all the details. I think students would love this lesson, especially if you incorporate the Constitutional aspect of it (like we did in Dr. W's class today). There are a lot of things you could do with this topic and I think incorporating podcasts helps bring it to life for today's students who are now decades removed from the Watergate scandal.
ReplyDeleteGotta love bugged phones. I wonder if Nixon expected his phone calls to be on podcasts 40 years later. Reading about watergate and hearing Nixon's actual calls are so different. It would have been such a treat to hear this stuff in a high school history class.
ReplyDeleteI agree! I think it would be a very interesting way to make a civics lesson much more interesting. I think listening to the podcasts would definitely put a face to the name. I think that using this for teaching checks and balances would be a great idea! =)
ReplyDeleteI also created an iTunesU collection about Richard Nixon and I like the ideas you and Mallory came up with.
ReplyDeleteWatergate can be very confusing to some students, but its a very important incident to consider for both historical and civic reasons.
The resources in the collection should help students better understand why Watergate was so important, while learning about executive power and checks and balances with the U.S. Government.