I'm planning a conversation activity where students have to...

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Created by Ana Antonia G. 2 replies

I'm planning a conversation activity where students have to antagonize/make alliances. They represent gays, differently-abled people and blacks. They work in groups of 3 where each minority is represented by 1 student. They are in a government-appointed committee where they are going to allocate funds to each group so they have to prioritise what is socially urgent or important; for example, ramps for buildings, quotas, cross-curricular contents at school and so on. How can I get them to use the words “crip”, “queer” and the “N WORD” incorrectly showing offence when the slur is misappropriated and pride when it is correctly used as a badge of honour? Is there a game strategy to kind of create some kind of “jinks”? Thanks!

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Veleslava I.

I may be wrong, but reading your post, I get the impression that you're approaching this from a cultural perspective that's quite different from the one I'm familiar with. In many English-speaking classrooms, asking students to role-play marginalized groups and use slurs—even to discuss reclamation—is likely to be seen as crossing an ethical line rather than encouraging meaningful discussion. Personally, I'd be concerned that the activity could make students uncomfortable or unintentionally reinforce the very stereotypes it's trying to examine. I wonder whether the same learning objectives could be achieved by analysing real-world examples or discussing them without asking students to perform those identities.

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