Spin Doctors Simulation – Stories of Power, Part 1 of 4

I should start by saying I have a strange job. I primarily teach Norwegian exchange students on one- or two-week courses. About one-third of these students are English studies BA students, one-third are teacher trainees, and one-third are teachers. The age of the students varies widely, and we get a lot of students over the course of a year; I have taught around 9,000 students since I got this job in 2015.

The courses I offer to these students are designed to focus on key ideas that can be taken away and applied more broadly. I have this focus because the background of the students varies, their knowledge and interest varies, and there’s no way they’re going to do a lot of reading in the period I have with them. In order to communicate these key ideas, I have designed a range of simulations and role plays.

One of the courses I run is entitled “Stories of Power,” which I think around 2,000-odd students have been to. Stories of Power has four lectures and four seminars about the manipulative use of language, discursive power, and, ultimately, the narrative construction of identity.  In theoretical terms it starts with Lukes’s third dimension of power (you can read my take here), and then shifts into more Foucauldian understandings of productive discursive power (without adopting any Foucauldian terminology).

In the first lecture I focus on active manipulation by discussing the use of euphemism, delegitimization, spin, and lying through numbers, all illustrated with political examples.

In the first seminar, students play the role of spin doctors using this scenario worksheet. The goal is to get the students really thinking about political language and, without necessary realising, using societally established discourses.

I split the students into groups of four and provide each group a handout with the same scenario on it (there are seven different scenarios included in the worksheet). Then, I largely let them get on with it, occasionally riffing on an idea I hear the groups come up with. If a group finishes early, I remind them that the best, choice bits of manipulation often come in the smallest uses of words and phrases as a prompt to eke out a bit more thought.

It’s necessary to watch the clock, as the speech-giving can take a while (say around 3 minutes a group), and then the final debrief around another three minutes. Before each speech, I read out the individual scenario prompt that the group was dealing with so that the whole class knows what the speech-givers are trying to cover up in their speech.

In the debrief, I like to highlight how each group used language, the manipulative phrases that they used, and the common tactics between the different speeches – it’s particularly nice to highlight ones they’ve used that I didn’t mention in the lecture.

I’ve then got three points to emphasise. The first is that it’s a real job, and the scenarios are all (slightly fictionalised versions of) real-world events. The second is that it’s an enjoyable activity because it’s creative (I normally ask them to put their hands up if they enjoyed it), even if they were being downright evil. The third is that in making the arguments they have made, they’ve drawn on narrative traditions. I’ve made the Spin Doctors the Conservatives in all of the scenarios, and I do this not to teach that the Conservatives are evil (that’s a different lecture) but because it reflects established narrative traditions that make it easier to use some arguments and more difficult to use others.

This final point–about how the discursive tactics they use are drawn from what others have done–is also the point that I pick up in the next lecture, which concerns political narrative traditions.

Beyond my situation, I think it could work well as an introductory seminar exercise (I’ve scaled it to 50-60 students at times), or it could likely fit in on courses on the media and politics or courses covering discursive power, the power of ideas, or ideational hegemony. I could also see that it could be adapted to different countries as a comparative way of bringing out how political cultures differ (i.e. differences in UK and US political rhetoric).