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!) I don't think you need to change your activity, try and let your students see the objectivity of the activity and how race should not be an issue. Try and switch the candidates and their perspectives as in what if this is the candidate that is proposing what his opponent is proposing, would you still have the same reaction? and vice versa. Tell your students they need to go above the prejudices before they make their contributions. Another thing I will suggest is that you might tell the whites to write on how they can persuade people to vote for the black candidate and tell the blacks to do the same for the white candidate. This is a very controversial topic so one needs to be careful.