On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in April 1968, Jane Elliott`s third graders from the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, came to class confused and upset. They recently had made King their "Hero of the Month," and they couldn`t understand why someone would kill him. So Elliott decided to teach her class a daring lesson in the meaning of discrimination. She wanted to show her pupils what discrimination feels like, and what it can do to people. What happened over the course of the unique two-day exercise astonished both students and teacher. In the last part of "A Class Divided," Jane Elliott takes her exercise to employees of the Iowa prison system. During a daylong workshop in human relations she teaches the same lesson to the adults. Their reactions to the blue-eye, brown-eye exercise are similar to those of the children. Discussion Board Assignment – Part 1 (Check Course Calendar for Due Date) Watch the A Class Divided (1985) video: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html After viewing the video, select and answer three of the following questions. Each response should follow the minimum 6-7 sentence paragraph format. To receive full credit, use (and properly cite!) the class text to define your term(s) (when possible), offer specific examples (ie, dialogue and/or action descriptions from the video) AND relate what you observed to a recent event in your own life. To publish your Part 1 posts, enter the discussion forum and insert your response and click "Submit." Remember to start your posts with an opening greeting and include a signature at the end. Title your post correctly: LastName_First_Name_Part_1_SUBJECT. What did the children`s body language indicate about the impact of discrimination? In the prison seminar, one of the white women asserts that all people face some kind of discrimination. Another woman challenges her, claiming that whites can`t really know what it`s like to face discrimination every minute of every day. What do you think? How did the negative and positive labels placed on a group become self-fulfilling prophecies? What features did Elliott ascribe to the superior and inferior groups and how did those characteristics reflect stereotypes about blacks and whites? How did Elliott`s discrimination create no-win situations for those placed in the inferior group? How did she selectively interpret behavior to confirm the stereotypes she had assigned? Are we trained to discriminate or be prejudiced? How do we learn to be prejudiced? Can we/should we be colorblind? At recess, two of the boys from different groups get in a fight. Elliott asks the one who was teased if responding with violence made him feel better or made the teasing stop. What does the answer suggest about the use of violence as a political strategy? At the time, who was using violence for political purposes and why? Discussion Board Assignment – Part 2 (Check Course Calendar for Due Date) Log back into the Discussion Board and select and reply to two entries from your classmates. These can be in the same thread as any of your responses or in another thread. Each of your replies should use the 6-7 sentence paragraph format. To receive full credit, clearly state what you found most interesting in the person`s response and then relate your own point of view to their response. Remember to start your posts with an opening greeting and include a signature at the end. Title your post correctly: LastName_First_Name_COMM101_Part_2_Reply. Grading This Discussion activity is worth 20 points towards your course grade. It will be graded according to the following: Part 1 (8 Points) At least one full 6-7 sentence paragraph responding to one of the questions 0-4 At least one full 6-7 sentence paragraph responding to a second question 0-4 At least one full 6-7 sentence paragraph responding to a third question 0-4 Part 2 (12 Points) Full paragraph to first person that comments on commonalities or asks questions 0-4 Full paragraph to a second person that comments on commonalities or asks questions 0-4
