In A Class Divided: Then and Now by William Peters, a pioneer chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, the author meets with eleven former students (now adults) and Jane Elliott, their third-grade teacher, to watch the documentary in which they had been filmed in a class exercise on prejudice. The group watches the film and comments on how the "blue-eye-brown-eye" exercise affected them as children and impacted their views on racial discrimination as adults.
In an effort to help her third-graders understand the meaning of racial prejudice soon after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Ms. Elliott divided the class into brown-eyed and blue-eyed students. The first day the brown-eyed were declared to be superior and the blue-eyed had to wear collars to mark their inferior status from afar. The next day the roles were reversed.
The body language of the "inferior" group on any given day involved slumping, scowling, and sometimes tears, while the postures assumed by the "superior" group were notably straight and confident. The behavior matched the body language as well, with enthusiasm and good test scores in the "superior" group and hesitation and poor test scores in the "inferior" group.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
What did the children's body language indicate about the impact of discrimination in A Class Divided?
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