Jane Elliott (born May 27, 1933) is a former third-grade school teacher, anti-racism activist, and educator, as well as a feminist and an LGBT activist. He is known for his "Blue Eye-Eye Chocolate" exercise. He first performed his famous practice for his class the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. killed. When his local paper published a composition the children wrote about the experience, the reactions (both positive and negative) formed the basis for his career as a public speaker against discrimination. Exercise in Elliott's class was filmed for the third time he held it with his 1970s class to become The Eye of the Storm. This in turn inspired the retrospective that reunited 1970 class members with their teachers fifteen years later in A Class Divided . After leaving school, Elliott became a full-time diversity educator. He still holds the practice and gives lectures on its impact across the US and in several locations overseas.
Video Jane Elliott
Early life and career
Elliott was born in 1933 to Lloyd and Margaret (Benson) Jennison on his family farm at or near Riceville, Iowa. His father, who gave birth to him, was an Irish-American. She is the fourth child of several children.
In 1952, after graduating from high school, Elliott attended Iowa State Teachers College (now University of Northern Iowa), where he obtained an emergency basic teaching certificate in five quarters. In 1953, he began his teaching career at a one-room school in Randall.
Maps Jane Elliott
Motivation to teach about the effects of racism
On the night of April 4, 1968, Elliott lit his television and found out the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He said that he clearly remembered a scene in which a white reporter directed his microphone towards a local black leader and asked, "When our leader [John F. Kennedy] was killed several years ago, his widow was arrested with us Who would control your people? "Surprised that a journalist could feel that Kennedy was a" white man "leader, he then decided to combine the lessons he had planned on natives with the lesson he planned about. Martin Luther King Jr. for the February Hero of the Month project. By the time he was watching the news of King's death, he ironed the teepee for use in the lesson unit of Native Americans. To tie the two lessons together, he used Sioux's prayer, "Oh, great spirit, keep me safe so I never judge a man until I walk on his mummification." - city, white student, experience walking in "moccan colored children for a day."
The next day, he held a class discussion about lessons and also spoke about racism in general. He then said: "I can see that they do not internalize something They do what white people do When white people sit down to discuss what racism they are experiencing ignorance together." Most of Elliott's eight-year-old students, like him, were born and raised in the small town of Riceville, Iowa and they are usually not exposed to blacks. He felt that just talking about racism would not allow his all-white class to fully understand the meaning and effects of racism.
The first exercise involving brown eyes and collar
Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott's classroom; (referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.) he asked, "Why did they shoot the King?" After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them how they thought it was to be a black boy or girl. He suggested to the class that it would be difficult for them to understand discrimination without experiencing it themselves and then ask the children if they wanted to find out. The children agreed with the choir "yes". She decided to base the exercise on eye color rather than skin color to show the children what kind of racial segregation it is.
On the first day of practice, he designates blue-eyed children as a superior group. Elliott provides brown fabric collars and asks blue-eyed students to wrap them around the neck of their brown-eyed peers as a method to easily identify minority groups. She gives the children additional blue-eyed privileges, such as a second meal at lunch, access to a new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at rest. The blue-eyed kids sat in front of the class, and brown-eyed children were sent to sit in the back row. Blue-eyed children are encouraged to play only with other blue-eyed children and ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott does not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same fountain and often beat up brown-eyed students when they do not follow the rules of practice or make mistakes. He often exemplifies the differences between the two groups by selecting students and will use the negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize a point.
At first, there was a rejection among students in minority groups with the idea that blue-eyed children are better than brown-eyed children. To overcome this, Elliott lied to the children by stating that melanin is associated with their higher intelligence and learning abilities. Soon, this initial resistance falls. Those who are considered "superior" to be arrogant, like to rule, and otherwise unpleasant to their "inferior" classmates. Their grades on simple tests are better, and they complete math and reading tasks that seem beyond their previous abilities. "Inferior" classmates are also changing - being cowardly and obedient children who score lower on tests, and even during breaks isolating themselves, including those previously dominant in the classroom. The academic achievement of these children suffers, even with previously simple tasks.
The following Monday, Elliott reversed the practice, making brown-eyed children superior. While the brown eyed kids were mocking the blue-eyed kids in a way similar to what happened the previous day, Elliott reported it was less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed kids to take off their collars. To reflect on the experience, he asked the children to write down what they had learned.
Public reaction and attention
The compositions the children wrote about the experience were printed on the Riceville Recorder on April 4, 1968, under the heading "How Discrimination Was Beneficial," and the story was raised by the Associated Press.. Because of the Associated Press article, Elliott was invited to appear on the The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson . After he talked about his practice in the short interview segment, his audience's reaction was suddenly as hundreds of calls went into the phone's switchboard, mostly negative. The often quoted letter states, "How dare you try this cruel experiment on white children? The blacks grow accustomed to such behavior, but the white children, there is no way they can understand it. white children and will cause them great psychological damage. "
The publicity that Elliott gets does not make him popular at Riceville. When he walked into the teachers' room the day after his performance Tonight , several other teachers came out. When he goes downtown to do his job, he hears a whisper. When her eldest daughter went to the girls' bathroom in junior high, she came out of a kiosk to see a hateful message scribbled with red lipstick for her in the mirror.
Of all his colleagues, Elliott stated that only one of them, Ruth Setka, kept talking to her after her training was published. Setka says that she realizes she's the only one who keeps talking to him. Setka believes that the reason Eliot's practice gets so much reaction is because the students are so young and the exercise should be done on at least junior high school students. In an interview in 2003, Elliot said that about 20% of the Riceville community is still mad at him about what he did on April 4, and some still call him "n-word lovers", but he's grateful for the other 80%.
However, when news of his practice spread, he appeared on more television shows and began repeating exercises in professional adult training days. On December 15, 1970, Elliott staged the experience to adult educators at the White House Conference on Children and Youth.
In 1970, ABC produced a documentary about Elliott entitled The Eye of the Storm, which made it even more nationally known. Furthermore, William Peters writes two books - Divided and Divided: Then and Now - about himself and his practice. A Class Divided was transformed into a PBS documentary Frontline in 1985 and included a reunion of schoolchildren featured on The Eye of the Storm, which Elliott received The Hillman Prize. An edition aired on television was shown in the UK on October 29, 2009, on Channel 4 titled Events: How's Your Racist? The documentary is intended, according to the producers in their agreement with Jane Elliott, to create awareness of the effects of racist behavior by using British citizens. After the exercise, Elliott said that the results were "not as successful as I am used to."
Elliott was featured by Peter Jennings on ABC as "Person of the Week" on April 24, 1992. He is listed on the timeline of 30 renowned educators by textbook editors McGraw-Hill along with Confucius, Plato, Booker T. Washington, and Maria Montessori. He has been invited to speak at 350 colleges and universities and has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show five times.
In November 2016, Elliott's name was added to the BBC's annual list of 100 Women .
The origin of workplace diversity training
Elliott is considered a pioneer of diversity training, with Blue-Eyes-Brown-Eyes training as the basis of many now called diversity training. He has been training for companies such as General Electric, Exxon, AT & T, and IBM, and lectures to the FBI, the IRS, the US Navy, the US Department of Education and the US Postal Service.
Riceville's school system gave Elliott unpaid leave to conduct workshops and training that were based on his training for organizations outside his school system. However, the increasing demand for getting away from the classroom eventually causes problems with teaching careers in public schools. Elliott abandoned teaching in the mid-1980s to devote himself full-time to diversity training, rebuilding his classroom training for business. This is positively promoted as a way to promote teamwork, profit, and a "win together" atmosphere. For this corporate exercise, Elliott splits a multiracial group based on the color of their eyes and then subjects blue-eyed people to a melodious insult and humiliation regime. In just a few hours, Elliott's care made blue-eyed workers distracted and desperate, staggered at the simplest of orders.
The company found the idea of ​​offering such training interesting, not only because in the 1970s and 1980s there was an increase in the number of colored people in their organizations but also because of US court decisions and federal policies to promote multiculturalism caused by pressure from the rights civil rights. groups over the same two decades.
Many companies at that time came to see diversity training as a way to ward off negative legal action and publicity. Elliott said, "If you can not think of any other reason to get rid of racism, think of it as a real money saver." The diversity training inspired by Elliott has been used outside the United States. Training diversity was little known in the UK in the early 1990s; however, when the Race Amendment Act 2000 endorsed in the UK, 100 diversity training firms are listed in the Diversity Directory. According to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 70% of companies have a diversity policy in which diversity training plays a major role. Many of these programs are designed to have a "lighter touch" than Elliott's approach, but that based on Elliott's model is also promoted.
Original practice legacy
Dean Weaver, who supervised Riceville's school from 1972 to 1979, thought he was an extraordinary teacher who did things differently and made other teachers jealous of his success. Former school principal Steve Harnack commented that he was very good at teaching academics and suggested he would have fewer problems with the community if he involves parents. Elliott's former colleague Ruth Setka commented on Riceville's attitude to Elliott: "Everyone is bored with it, I'm tired of hearing about him and his experiments and how everyone here is racist.That's not true. Let's just move on."
Academic research into the Blue-Eye-Red Eye practice
The academic research into Elliott's exercises shows a moderate result in reducing long-term bias but is not convincing on the question of whether the psychological hazards are likely to outweigh the potential benefits. The measured outcome of the diversity training for adults is moderate. The result of a 1990 research study by Utah State University is that almost all subjects reported that the experience was meaningful to them. However, the statistical evidence supporting the effectiveness of activities for prejudice reduction is moderate enough; and almost all participants, as well as simulation facilitators, reported stress from the simulation.
Another evaluation of the program in 2003, conducted by Tracie Stewart at the University of Georgia, shows that white students are getting a much more positive attitude toward Asian-Americans and Latinos, but few positive attitudes toward African-American individuals. In some courses, participants may feel frustrated about their "inability to change" and instead start feeling angry towards groups that they should be more sensitive. It can also cause anxiety because people become hyper-sensitive about being offensive or offended. There is no excellent measure of effect for long-term outcomes of this training initiative.
As a result of a 1990 study, Murdoch University did not include Blue-Eyes-Brown-Eyes exercises in their list of successful strategies to reduce racism.
Personal life
Elliott married Darald Elliott (1934-2013) from 1955 to his death, and had four children. They maintain a residence in Osage, Iowa and Sun City, California.
See also
- Blue Eyed (film 1996) - German film based on Blue Eyes-Eye-Chocolate exercises
- Racing: Last Taboo Sciences - series with episodes based on Eye-Eye-Chocolate-eye exercises
- Stanford prison experiment
- White guilt
- White privileges
References
External links
- Official website
- Jane Elliott on IMDb
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments