Today was the first day that Dan, Rachel, and I had worked with our students in the classroom. We opened with the idea of deconstructing stereotypes and judgments that we place initially on one another. We had the students write down their initial thoughts of who we were and what we do, along with a picture of a girl from Syria. Students eagerly added to the sheets behind us.
I believe that this went very well, because the students were laughing at some of the comments their peers had made and teasing us not to peek. After this, we asked the students to silently introduce themselves to the person across from them. This was done in a charades style of gesturing. Some students tried to write or point when finding the words to say, and others had found unique gestures for number of siblings to what their hobbies are.
Our group is very driven and interested. They all engage, whether with the full classroom or in smaller groups. We showed them this video from the Love Has No Labels campaign. We asked them to think about how the video relates to the prior activities. The students were able to make great connections and shared about times judgments had affected them personally or they had judged. These students are open and understand that sharing their stories help others learn.
Following, we worked on a matrix of oppression that looked into different judgments that different groups of people face. Students did not have to fill it out, but were encouraged to write down thoughts and feelings in a personal journal. Our original intent was to have the students decide what would be the matrix of a Syrian refugee; however, time was not on our side! We decided to bring this back on Thursday to compare to the Iceberg theory.
Afterwards, we began to read a denser article from CNN about Islamophobia. We allowed the students to spread out, go down the hall, and read alone or in pairs so they could digest the article in the best way possible. Rachel shared tips for note-taking and annotating that some students adapted while reading their article.
Lastly, we asked the students to think about what they would like to do to tell the story of a Syrian refugee. We wanted to leave it open-ended to students, so they could be free with their projects. We hope to have many creative displays of stories that students can tell a story beyond what stereotypes of a refugee come into play.
We have groups that want to work with images. Does anybody have any suggestions about how to use google images or magazines for photo collages? Any other suggestions in general?
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