Culture: Racism Redefined--A Cultural Conversation

Elizabeth Proffitt
Marseille, France

This is a wonderful activity that gets your students thinking about issues such as racism, homophobia, sexism and prejudice. It also is a great activity which will open your high schooler's minds to important cultural issues and learn English at the same time.

Level: Intermediate to Advanced

How to Start:

Write the words Prejudice, Racism, Sexism and Homophobia on the board. As your students start to come into the classroom, they will be chatting about these very profound words you have written on the board, and will be VERY curious as to what you are going to do. Start the class discussion by referring to these words, telling the students that the class will be talking about them in groups later. Then, I get my students thinking by writing the word, Stereotypes, on the board. (Stereotypes being a universal word that extends to each of the other words already on the board.) I ask my students, "Can you think of any stereotypes about Americans?" This gets everyone buzzing- "They're all fat!" they say, "They only eat McDonald's!" "They carry guns and wear cowboy hats!" It gets the students roaring... Then I pick on some of their examples, like "All Americans are fat." I ask them if they watch the TV show "Baywatch" and get them to describe to me the types of people that are on the show- (They describe Pamela Anderson, which then has you pointing to their original stereotype that all Americans are fat, which obviously Pamela Anderson is not!) This example actually gets the students to discover more stereotypes that contract some of the ones they told you before--"they all have plastic surgery, they're all blonde..." etc. I always ask my students, "so which stereotype is it, we're all fat, or we're all Pamela Anderson running on the beach." Anyway, the point is that they start to think that maybe stereotypes aren't true...

Step Two:

Divide the students into groups of 4 and tell them to write definitions (in English of course) for your words on the board. Encourage the use of dictionaries to translate but not English dictionaries that will give them the definition of each word! Give the students about 15 minutes to come up with their definitions. Then, have one student representative from each group read their group's definition for Racism to the rest of the class. The interesting thing is that each group has a different definition! This is when the students brains really start working and they start to realize that racism means different things to different people. You can discuss at length all of their definitions and discover questions on the spot that will keep the conversation going. The only problem is that sometimes your class time runs out before you're finished!

Anyway, this is a really successful lesson plan with teenagers, especially since these issues are so prevelant in our society and yet are so rarely talked about.

Hope it works for you!