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 can totally relate to this. My students were finishing up their unit on the Civil War during the time of the election. I had my students participate in a mock election because I also agree with democratic education. After I posted the results from the election their attention went from reasons regarding health care and education straight to racial issues. Many students began to discuss how their parents felt and some of the comments were totally inappropriate. Although they did not get totally out of hand, their behavior did make me a little skeptical. I feel that we both had good ententions of exposing our students to the democratic system of participating in government, and we should continue to do so. We just need to make sure that we set boundaries and understand that we may all have to disagree to agree, but in a civil manner.