Select a topic relevant to your class. Whether your class is a history, social sciences or marketing class, you can use magazine advertisements to illustrate interesting concepts to your students. The fist step in doing this is to select a topic that is both relevant to your coursework and that can be tied in to magazines. For example, a social sciences assignment might look at racial or gender stereotypes in American culture. Or a history assignment might look at changing attitudes toward the family throughout the last 40 years of American history.
Determine the lesson you want to teach your students within your topic. For example, if your topic is gender and racial biases in American popular culture, you may wish to demonstrate to students that women are often depicted engaging in domestic activities in magazine advertisements while men are shown in the workplace or playing sports.
Craft an assignment that illustrates your point using magazine ads. For example, you might divide students into groups and assign different types of magazines to students, giving some cooking magazines, others sports magazines and others fashion or music magazines. Ask them to clip out advertisements and pay attention to the role of women in the advertisements for example and to record any interesting observations they may have made.