June 7th, 2019

Hello! How are you all doing?
I was in class (diversity in the classroom) yesterday and there were presentations! Today, I would like to present to you a very nice activity about diversity that can be adapted for school administrators, teachers and students!

Context with the theory

Click on the image to find where it came from

In order to empower students in terms of their diversity, we are encouraged to find out about our own biases. How can we implement changes in the curriculum without properly finding out what our personal beliefs are? Knowing our biases can really help us change our perspectives and put ourselves into our students’ shoes a lot better/faster than we would without. It would be nice for school administrators to do something like this among themselves and also with parent councils, just because that way, it would help everyone situate themselves in terms of each others’ biases and ideals. Knowing this can only encourage a gradual paradigm shift towards changing the education system for the better of our students!

Other thoughts

I’m not sure how this can be adapted for younger students, however, as there is a question about stereotypes, I would say that as of high school, my students would probably have experienced enough prejudice and have the knowledge and maturity to speak about them. I would probably do this kind of activity at the beginning of the year of a second cycle high school class, as a Needs Analysis kind of activity disguised as an ice breaker!

Aims

This activity aims to not only make us reflect on what identifies us, but also makes us think about others, because we share our experiences through key questions (such as “what experience made you proud of being <this identifier>“, or “what experience made it painful to be <this identifier>” and of course, in class yesterday, we were told that if we didn’t feel comfortable sharing certain aspects, we didn’t need to (I felt that was very nice of them).

Link

You can find this activity here.

See you all next time!
Have you ever tried this activity before?
Please, tell me more!
PV