 |
Home
| How It Works
| Stats
Login | Register |
|
Case: Politically or Racially-Aware I believe in democracy. As a high school social sciences teacher, I strongly believe in democratic education and political awareness. I want my students to be aware of what is going on around them locally, nationally, and internationally. I require my students to keep up with news. Everything they learn from newspapers, magazines, and television becomes substance to use in my lessons. Before the presidential elections, I asked my students to watch all the debates, try to see the different perspectives, and how those perspectives may lead to different courses of action and to different implications for people. As part of this effort, I gave students a "persuasive writing" assignment. I gave them a list of topics from the debates, such as abortion, healthcare, affirmative action, and foreign policy. Students were to take a position on one of these issues and write a persuasive essay. When it was time for students to share their writings in class, things got out of hand. Every single topic we discussed along with the essays turned into a discussion of race. My Black and White students took opposite perspectives on every issue and during the discussions, they were not civil. I felt like my efforts for democratic education were not producing anything good. Should I change my activities? How come the political awareness I wanted develop in my students actually turned out to be racial awareness? Some guidance please! Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) The teacher should create two candidate profiles that leaves the candidates identity anonymous. By discussing each candidates views on specific issues while keeping their identity unknown the students can discuss and formulate their own opinions as to which candidate they agree with more. The students can then create their persuasive essay in class so that they cannot use the internet or outside sources to determine the identity of the candidates. The teacher should make sure that the facts given to the students are unbiased and reliable resources. After the students have completed their essays the teacher can reveal the true identity of the candidates. The teacher can go on to explain that race should not be a factor in choosing a candidate. The teacher should provide the students with the resources that he/she used so that students do not feel like the teacher used any bias in presenting the facts about the candidates. |
||
Rating
|
||||||||||||||||||