Slide Deck to Share with Students HERE

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​​​Lesson Objectives:

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Students will be able to:

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1. Make a plan for challenging conversations about injustice and other challenging topics with friends and family members

2. Be better prepared for impromptu conversations about injustice and other challenging topics with friends and family members

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Learning Standards:

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LfJ 17. Students will recognize their own responsibility to stand up to exclusion, prejudice, and injustice

LfJ 18. Students will speak up with courage and respect when they or someone else has been hurt or wronged by bias

LfJ 19. Students will make principled decisions about when and how to take a stand against bias and injustice in their everyday lives and will do so despite negative peer or group pressure

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​​​Learning Activities (If you have 15 minutes…)

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Greeting (Slide 4): Which Peppa Pig are you today?

 

Reading (Slide 6):

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“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

 

Question for students: What does this quotation get you thinking about?

 

Initiative

 

Slide 7: Talk with your students about why it is important to sometimes engage in challenging conversations with friends and family about injustice

 

Slide 8: Opening Questions (perhaps start as a turn & talk with partners)

 

• What have been some moments where a sensitive topic came up in conversation with your friends or family?

• What happened?

• How did you engage or not engage?

• What made the experience challenging?

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Learning Activities (if you have 45 minutes….)

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Initiative (continued):

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Slides 9-12: Share with your students some practical strategies for engaging in these types of conversations

 

Ask your students: Which of these strategies have you used in the past? Which seem like they could be helpful to try?

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​​Learning Activities (if you have 2 hours…)​

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Initiative (continued)

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Slides 13-17: Challenging conversations scenarios

 

Share with students that you’re going to ask them to envision three different scenarios where they hear someone make a comment that they consider offensive. With a partner, they will brainstorm how to respond to the comment.

 

Warn students that you are going to share with them three scenarios that explicitly and intentionally involve someone making a comment that is racist, xenophobic, so prepare themselves emotionally to think about someone making such a comment (And explain that we’re considering these types of problematic comments with the goal of learning to challenge them)

 

Put students into partners and assign them one of the three scenarios to discuss with their partner

 

Then discuss as a whole class- What approaches did students come up with for responding to these scenarios?

 

Slide 18: Share with students some different strategies that microaggression scholar Derald Wing Sue recommends for responding to microaggressions.

 

Which of these approaches resonate with the ideas you came up with?

Which of these approaches might you consider trying?

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Debrief (Slide 18)

 

1. What did you like about today’s lesson?

2. Did you learn anything new about yourself or anyone else?

3. What could make it better?

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