Warm-Up Activity 4.1: Take a Prejudice Quiz

Take this interactive quiz on prejudice at the, Social Psychology Network website (Understanding Prejudice: Baseline Survey), located under your weekly resources, to get a baseline on your own awareness of prejudice and stereotypes. Do this before your readings and the rest of the assignment.

Warm-Up Activity 4.2: Ethnic Slurs

Ethnic slurs probably have been around since early civilization and someone felt the need to insult another person. Some slurs take common everyday words or phrases and redefine them to describe a specific group of individuals in a negative manner. Take, for example, the word gay. Its common meaning is to be happy, carefree, and somewhat showy. Its cultural meaning evolved from a variety of usages and appears in a modern day dictionary in the 1930s as a pejorative prison slang term meaning homosexual boy. Beginning in the 1960s and the start of the Gay Rights movement in the United States, the homosexual community embraced the term as a description; today, it is the LGBT community’s preferred term used to describe male homosexuals or for being homosexual in general. Southern hospitality is another term that started as a negative ethnic slur; however, it has evolved into a contemporary positive term. During the U.S. Civil War, Union soldiers used the term sarcastically to describe the less-than-friendly welcome they received from Southern state citizens. Today, however, the term is widely viewed as an altruistic behavior in which people open their homes to strangers.

Are you aware of the origin of some of the slang you may use? To find out, The Racial Slur Database, located under your weekly resources.

Warm-Up Activity 4.3: Prejudice and Power

In examining the concept of prejudice, it is important also to consider how cultural influences create power inequities. Hayes (2001) presents a model of such influences that may be of help to you in better understanding this social dynamics involved in prejudice.

Addressing: A Model of Cultural Influences and their Relationship to the Social Construct of Power

Reference

Hays, P.A. (2001). Addressing cultural complexities in practice: A framework for clinicians and counselors. Washington, D.C. American Psychological Association.

Warm-Up Activity 4.4: Watch videos

Watch these videos, located under your weekly resources, to further explore racism and racial tension in schools:

Films Media Group. (2001) Real Life Teens: Racial Tension on Campus.

Films Media Group. (1999). Segment 1: Racism in Schools. Color-Blind: Fighting Racism in Schools.

Assignment 

For this task you will reflect on what you learned about your own feelings toward prejudice, and from your readings in the text, and the films you viewed. Then, you will design an educational intervention to defuse prejudice in your local high school.

The intervention could be delivered at a school assembly or as a unit in a high school advisory program. Notice the particular racial and ethnic tensions that exist in the school you select, and then choose the appropriate material.

Prepare a package of material that you would give to the school counselors for their implementation of the intervention. Your package should include:

• A transcript for a 10-minute lecture
• A short play or interactive game that would engage the students to consider the impact of prejudice. (You may adapt an already existing play or game to fit your particular environment, or you may create your own.)
• An annotated list of at least five resources that the school counselor could use to deal with prejudice and its impact at the school. The annotated list should include the name and author of the resource, type of resource (article, film, etc.), where to access it, and a short description of the resource.

Length: Lecture transcript 10 minutes (2-3 pages); play or game (3-5 page explanation); and an annotated list (1-2 pages)

To make your lecture engaging, you may depart from usual writing form and organization and choose to use anecdotes, humor, or other speaking tools; however, be sure, to cite your sources appropriately in the print version of the lecture that you submit. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University's Academic Integrity Policy.

Upload your intervention package and click the Submit to Dropbox button.