Conversation Class Lesson Summary

Language Resident Name:

Katherine Pérez Gutiérrez

Maria Glukhova

Marie Segura

Day and Date:

Week 2, Fall 2020

Language and Level (intermediate or advanced class):

All

Class theme/topics discussed:

Black Lives Matter, Social Movements, Discrimination

Goal of the class:

To talk about racial/ethnic discrimination and about social movements that fight for people’s rights.

Useful recourses for LRs:

Books/articles & Film resources about BLM principles (different levels): https://www.dcareaeducators4socialjustice.org/black-lives-matter/resources/middle-high#books 

How did you structure the class?

0. Greetings, announcements, general questions

  1. Conversation starters:

Racism 2020: What is the first situation/context/everyday situation that comes to your mind when thinking about racism?

What kinds of discrimination exist? (age, sex, nationality, etc.)

What do you know about the history of protest in the U.S? What about X language speaking countries?

What role has social media played on the display of news? Where have you been getting all protest related info from? Do you think it has made a difference on how people have found out what’s going on in the world?

“Generation” differences = how are different generations talking about/approaching current issues?

What makes someone worthy of getting a statue/a monument with their name? How important is it to think about the ideology that these monuments represent? Do they represent a person (wow, great guy!) or an ideology? What does removing a statue involve/represent/imply?

2. “Activities”

This topic has to do a lot with the language and the way we name things. For students, to learn what vocabulary is appropriate when we talk about race/ethnicity (more problematic for Russia, for example) might be helpful to read a short text/watch a video, with as many necessary words as possible.     


— Variant 1: 

Take a Facebook/IG post where a person (an activist, for example) examines racial problems/stereotypes/… in your target language. Cover the words that are terms that you want students to learn. Then write them down in a google doc so that students could translate them into English working together. Then ask the students to fill the gaps in the original text. Read the text together and discuss what message an author is trying to convey. 

— Variant 2:  [Mostly for Russia and other countries with ethnic discrimination

For some countries, ethnic discrimination is way more common than racial. The everyday discrimination against migrants from the countries to the South of Russia (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and others) is in almost every advertisement: “I will lease an apartment only to persons of Slavic appearance”, “We will only employ people of Slavic appearance”. So, you could show students these advertisements as an example of how racial and ethnic discrimination is pretty much everywhere.

— Variant 3: 

Give students a few short articles about specific issues (racism, discrimination, etc.). Students should do some research in pairs, read it together, and then present what they have learned about a problem. You may want to give an article with two different perspectives/times (have things changed?)/places. Instead of an article, you can give students an advertisement/flyer/ad from, for example, a different century, that wouldn’t be acceptable now and then discuss what why.

— Variant 4: 

Discuss Black Lives Matter’s 13 principles: Restorative Justice, empathy, loving engagement, diversity, globalism, queer affirming, trans-affirming, collective value, intergenerational, black families, black villages, unapologetically black, black women.  What do you think is the most problematic issue to address/deal with?

What technology, media or props did you use? (internet resources, playmobiles, handouts, etc.)

Zoom

What worked well in this class? What did not work?

How could this class be improved/ modified?