Education

"Emotional Objectivity" and "A Class Divided": "Simulated Trauma" for Character Education #2

by Clay Burell

categories: Curricula And Methods, Student Rights And Welfare

Published January 13, 2009 @ 02:10PM PT

This is a follow-up to the "Simulated Trauma" for Character Education post from earlier today.*

“Emotional Objectivity”: A Learning Paradox

Toward the end of his must-read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen writes:

When two-thirds of American seventeen-year-olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century, or 22 percent of my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea, we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance. This is resistance [to " 'learning' isolated, incoherent, and meaningless data"] raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even those details of American history that educated citizens should know. Still less do they learn what caused the major develpments in our past. Therefore, they cannot apply lessons from the past to current issues.

Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or rebut historical referents used in arguments by candidates for office, sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowedge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss.

Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick. We remember where we were when we heard of the attack on the World Trade Center because it affected us emotionally. . . . As textbook critic Mrs. W. K. Haralson writes, “There is no way the glowing, throbbing events of history can be presented fairly, accurately, and factually without involving emotion” (Loewen, 342-3). [Emphases added.]

Linger on the paradox in that last line. In essence, it argues that without emotion, historical objectivity is a fallacy, and this goes against the popular conception of objectivity as a dispassionate stance - “Present all sides and let students come to their own conclusions.” While some history teachers I have known and worked with understood that “all sides” (yes, a problematic concept) can be presented with the emotions attaching to those respective sides, but without crossing the line into indoctrination, more have mistaken this tightrope-walk for a breach of the objective ideal of the profession.

Loewen and Haralson, though, claim that without experiencing the emotions of history, students find it irrelevant and boring, and really don’t learn it more deeply than is necessary to pass the class. Garbage in and out.

All of this supports the application of experiential simulations to deepen student learning about a whole host of topics (see the child labor/sweatshop example on my last post, and on the Human Trafficking blog).

Let me close with the classic example of how such experiences can teach life-long lessons:

A Class Divided

Body Language in "A Class Divided": Blue-Eyes in Front, Brown-Eyes in Back

If you take no other recommendation from me ever in your life, take this one. I had read about this famous lesson before, and about the documentary film, but had never watched it myself. I watched it earlier this year with my wife, and it jolted me in ways text couldn’t.

This third-grade teacher put the emotion in history, and judging by the film, taught her third-graders a lesson that changed them not “until garbage out,” but for life.

From the PBS FRONTLINE site:

This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE’s history. It is about [Jane Elliott,] an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives. . . .

[O]n the night of the day that Martin Luther King was murdered, [Jane's] memories and experiences had coalesced into an idea of how she might give her third-graders a sense of what prejudice and discrimination really meant.

Jane took a deep breath and plunged in. “I don’t think we really know what it would be like to be a black child, do you?” she asked her class. “I mean it would be hard to know, really, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves, wouldn’t it?” Without real interest, the class agreed. “Well, would you like to find out?”

The children’s puzzlement was plain on their faces until she spelled out what she meant. “Suppose we divided the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people,” she said. “Suppose that for the rest of today the blue-eyed people became the inferior group. Then, on Monday, we could reverse it so that the brown-eyed children were inferior. Wouldn’t that give us a better understanding of what discrimination means?”

So I’ve said enough. If you do watch it, I’d love to read any thoughts in comments. The social engineering aspect of the lesson, as I said in my last post, is particularly gnarly. After seeing its results, though, and hearing the views of the townspeople about it, is this something you think should be used in classrooms around the world? Have you any stories of such a thing, or lessons similar to it?

Whatever the case, here’s to Jane Elliott, a new hero in my teaching pantheon.

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*Much of this post is taken from a 2008 post on my older blog.