In their respective classes with teachers Bud Kohler and Middle School Director Brian Christman, the students have been learning about the Roaring Twenties and the cultural developments at the time including the newest entertainment form, the radio. To gain a greater understanding and appreciation for life and culture of the “Age of Radio,” students were tasked with creating and presenting a five to eight minute radio broadcast. The Roaring Twenties Radio Broadcast project has been a tradition in History 7 classes for a number of years.

“We started this to give students more ownership over their own learning and create a fun and engaging method of demonstrating their learning,” said Mr. Christman. “It is an open-ended project that allows students to decide what to research and how to deliver their stories. They can pursue their personal interests with stories potentially covering music, movies, dance, poetry, and sports, amongst other topics.”

To prepare for the project, students were assigned into small groups where they brainstormed on research topics and cultural developments of the 1920s to present. Each member of the group was required to look for topics to further research, utilize at least two resources outside of the textbook, include meaningful statistics from research data and broadcasts that enhance the script, and create a shared document of all research sources and a brief learning summary.  For the broadcast and the script, the groups had to include six to eight newsworthy topics, two stories of national importance, a commercial break including an ad from one of the station’s “sponsors” and work together to assign lines to read. Students were encouraged to enhance the broadcast with sound effects. One student used an accordion in their broadcast - a project first.

The live broadcasts were presented in the Whitson Building with each group covering a variety of topics. Subjects of those topics included women voting in a federal election for the first time in 1920, Prohibition and the rise of gangsters, the Harlem Renaissance, Babe Ruth, the Scopes Trial, and more. To mimic the medium of radio, the other groups had to face the back wall of the classroom and listen to the hosts as opposed to watching them.

 “This project allowed the students to learn to be more independent and research more effectively, which will help them whenever they want to know more about a topic of interest,” shared Mr. Christman. “The process of turning secondary sources into authentic-sounding, present tense lines helps them understand the excitement and newness of the Twenties, often called the ‘New Era.’ Hopefully projects like this help students develop empathy and perspective by imagining themselves in the time period. The radio helped create a national ‘popular culture’ and it is interesting for them to think of Charles Lingbergh, the first person to complete a solo flight across the Atlantic, as more popular in his time than any of the public figures they follow today.”