I need div-ed remedial lessons

[mothwing]

"The majority of people in the US are white. What's wrong with having them on billboards!?"

Dear fellow teachers, I could use some diversity teaching help. A friend of mine recently showed the film "Blue Eyed" in her year 11 ESL class. The students understood the experiment and the need for it, but they got really stuck with the (to them) less

Comments

[antigrl117]

You are getting into some tricky issues, I took an immigration and education class and white privilege was a hard topic--even for grad students.

Maybe you could get demographics of either the US or the area and the kids can see the breakdown of ethnicities and then give them magazines/newspapers and have them tally what they see and then see if cultures/ethnicities are represented in the same way in advertisements?

(I'm also grasping at straws and I'm not sure it realy gets at what they were saying but it was just an idea off the top of my head)

[mothwing]

It definitely is a tricky issue. I like the idea to focus on them gaining an understanding of who is represented in the media in general, maybe that's the best way into this.

[shes_unreal]

I wish I had some ideas. Maybe she could try running the blue eyed experiment in her classroom? But I think a teacher got in big trouble for doing that with students before...

I work at an afterschool program at an elementary school with maybe one white kid out of 100+ students. Every Friday we show movies. When I mentioned to my co-workers that I wanted to try to find movies with people of different ethnicities, they either looked at me like I was crazy or laughed at me.

[mothwing]

I don't think that running the experiment itself is a good idea right now - my friend is new to the group, the group does know her well, and I think that if you don't know exactly what you're doing you can do a lot of damage as a teacher with this experiment. I wish I could run it, though, and I'd love to do it myself at some point to be better able to explore the possibilities of it.

GOD, that attitude of your colleagues is really frustrating. X_X btw, do you know this comm: 12films_poc? Might help give you some movie ideas.

[shes_unreal]

The crazy thing is that almost all of us who work in the program are minorities also, but for whatever reason they don't see anything wrong with showing films that are only about white people. Or, if they are about minorities, it's black and Hispanic kids living in the "hood" that a white person comes and saves (like in this movie we watched a little while ago about a white teacher teaching the poor inner city kids to play chess).

Maybe that's one way your friend can approach it - point out the lack of minority character in TV roles and especially in films. Maybe the class could even discuss the whole uproar surrounding "The Last Airbender" and "Avatar."

[snuck]

Sparky writes here on lj about privilege very well. He cross posts elsewhere these soI'm sure he won't mind you taking a look. Might get some ideas here - and while he focuses on homosexuality the principles are the same/similar enough.

[mothwing]

He does write really good entries and I did try to find ideas on minority bloggers on LJ, but so far, I haven't really found anything that gives me ideas on how to make my friend's students grasp this.

[mothwing]

Well, this is an ESL class, but we're in Germany, so most of them are white Germans in Germany and most of them don't have any minority experiences themselves, and especially when it comes to racial issues, they're really ignorant.

I like the approach of focusing on their own experiences, which would go well with the quote, but I'm worried that if their own experiences are more generic in nature than specifically related to being a member of an oppressed minority this might trivialise the oppressions that members of minorities face - being brown-haired when the ideal of western beauty is blonde hair is not the same as facing racism, for example, and I'd hate to think that the students wind up thinking things like that, though I suppose you could take care of that if you steer the discussion properly.

[mothwing]

Obviously it's not about that, but I'm worried that they'll take that away from the exercise if they are that unaware as to how the billboards could be problematic.

I absolutely agree about them needing a starting point that's rooted in their own experience, though.

[garnet21]

If you're focusing on white privilege, try reading this.

[mothwing]

Of course! Thanks for the link. Do you think that they could just go from the billboard problem to the privilege list, though? Because I've had students get pretty much "Uh, so...? The majority of people are white!" in response to the privilege list, too, and that'd lead to similar problems, so they might as well talk about the billboard first to raise awareness for representation and why the lack thereof is problematic.

[shes_unreal]

The majority of people in Germany may be white, but the majority of people in the world aren't. Have they considered that?

It's kind of like the prevailing view that most of the people in the world are Christian. Actually most of the people aren't, Christians just so happen to make up the largest combined percentage of one religion.

[smoopy_bitch]

Exactly. 64% is a majority (% as of most recent census that I could easily find data for) of the US, but that doesn't make up such a huge percent that no other race should be present in media to the extent that its happening now.