Book: Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice- A collection of articles and teaching ideas from many different teachers and researchers. (Pages 4-5, 38, 75)
Essential Question: How can we make our schools and classrooms to be “laboratories for a more just society that we live in now?”
Main Idea: The main purpose of this book is to show the students what they can do to make a difference. We want the students to not only study the progressive social movements and the current social problems but, to encourage the students to really think about what is going on around them and want to take charge and do something about it. It is important for the children “to see themselves as actors in the world, not just things acted upon.” (Rethinking Our Classrooms)
This lesson is to help students understand how our language can affect the ideas that we think about regarding different people. It is supposed to help us look at the different connotations and see how some of our phrases can be very harmful to prejudices.
Activity: First of all we would separate our class into groups or 4 or 5 and tell them that we are going to examine language. Have the groups think together of different phrases and words that contain the words black and white. And after 10 minutes or so have the groups go through their lists and mark each phrase or word as a positive, negative, or neutral connotation. Once they go through their lists, come back together as a class in a big circle and have the groups all share their lists. Then, I will have different definitions for the words black and white and share those with the class. After the definitions, we will have an open discussion with a few questions and finally we can have the students think about any other phrases or words that have prejudices lied within them and share those. As a homework or in-class assignment depending on how long the activity takes, you can assign a free-write about how the activity made the class feel about the prejudices that are everywhere.
1 comment:
I've seen this Black and White lesson play out in several classrooms now, and it is highly effective at helping students examine language. I'd suggest speaking with the Writing for Social Justice group (you may be in it? I'm not looking at my notebook at the moment) and making sure there is no overlap in your lesson planning. If there is, the text you have chosen addresses many levels of teaching tolerance and addressing racism, bias, etc. We will want to talk about the best way to execute this lesson.
Good ideas so far!
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