Blue eyes, brown eyes: Jane Elliott's exercise in prejudice

Photo used under Creative Commons license.  LINK

 Jane Elliott, a teacher, first tried her blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise with her class in an Iowa school in the 1960s, in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King.  You may have come across mention of it in your teacher training, or after.  While Wikipedia isn't the be-all and end-all of research, it's not a bad source for an outline of what she did, and what happened next (and check the citation list for further links).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

Photo used under Creative Commons license.  LINK

This came up at school recently when one of the seniors, from a Society and Culture class studying belief systems and associated -isms was asking me to help her locate information*.  Blue-eyed/brown-eyed came up in the discussion, and while looking for information we came across this 29 page pdf which covers the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise and after in great useful detail (the Wikipedia article seems likely to have drawn on it, and it's not Stephen G. Bloom's only article on this topic).  Find it here:

Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes:

The Experiment that Shocked the Nation

And Turned a Town Against its Most Famous Daughter

By Stephen G. Bloom

http://www.uiowa.edu/~poroi/seminars/2004-5/bloom/poroi_paper.pdf

Here's an interesting fact from that document:

It was Jane, for instance, who complained to the Crayola Company about its single flesh-color crayon, and today there are ten flesh-color crayons — from ebony to sand. It was Jane who complained to pantyhose companies about nudecolored pantyhose, and today there are dozens of nude shades hosiery companies manufacture.

I have tried a version of this exercise with a senior class, some years ago: not as intensely/intensively as Jane; but it still had a distinct impact on the kids, got them talking and thinking. 

So, a link to share with your History/English/Society and Culture teachers, or any you think might find it useful.  Seemed a waste not to blog it.

The student also went away with a copy of The Wave, by Morton Rhue, a fictionalised version of a similar exercise.  Lots of different ways to approach and consider an idea.

Cheers

Ruth

* when we'd finished this discussion, the student remarked that the Pew Internet research site I'd referred her to for an earlier assignment had been just what she needed, so she had come back to me.  Nice to get repeat business from confident customers! - I hadn't remembered that occasion, as we have so many kids here and it's hard to recall every detail of every day's discussions and conversations.  I appreciated knowing.  The happy life of teacher librarians: repeat business from happy customers!



Trove: researching Australia

Have you discovered Trove yet?

It's a project from the National Library of Australia.

Trove is a new discovery experience focused on Australia and Australians. It supplements what search engines provide. If you are researching in the fields of the social sciences, literature, local or family history, or need inspiration for your school assignment, then this is the tool for you.


For example if researching images relating to Edmund Barton, our first Prime Minister, results will include descriptions such as people, book, manuscript, map and newspaper articles. A researcher searching for information on Nellie Melba will be presented with a range of results including biographies, pictures, music, newspapers, books etc.

Find out more on the Trove Australia site here.  You can follow them on Twitter: @TroveAustralia

One to pass on to your history teachers and others doing work involving Australian history (like maybe that science assignment that focuses on Australian scientists?)

Cheers

Ruth

100 years' footage in 100 seconds

From Getty Images:



Here's the YouTube link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxqG2etM63Y

Short, sharp, and one to share - English teachers, History teachers....

Cheers

Ruth

Auschwitz museum revises its exhibits

One for your history teachers discussing how presentations of history can change.  The museum at Auschwitz is changing the exhibits, which were originally devised by former camp inmates.  Read about the changes, and the why, in this article from the New York Times: Auschwitz shifts from memorializing to teaching, by Michael Kimmleman.



The article begins:

OSWIECIM, Poland — For nearly 60 years, Auschwitz has told its own story, shaped in the aftermath of the Second World War. It now unfolds, unadorned and mostly unexplained, in displays of hair, shoes and other remains of the dead. Past the notorious, mocking gateway, into the brick ranks of the former barracks of the Polish army camp that the Nazis seized and converted into prisons and death chambers, visitors bear witness via this exhibition.


Now those in charge of passing along the legacy of this camp insist that Auschwitz needs an update. Its story needs to be retold, in a different way for a different age.

Partly the change has to do with the simple passage of time, refurbishing an aging display. Partly it’s about the pressures of tourism, and partly about the changing of generations. What is the most visited site and the biggest cemetery in Poland for Jews and non-Jews alike, needs to explain itself better, officials here contend.



I've never been to Auschwitz, so to illustrate this blog entry I went to Flickr and searched for Creative Commons licensed images to use; which is what all the ones here are (click on any image to go to its Flickr location/photographer's photostream, where you will find larger versions; I used the Small size for them here).  There is also a Flickr group for Auschwitz photos.  Another idea to suggest to your history teachers, when they are seeking images to illustrate particular historical topics: chances are for many many historical sites, ancient or modern, someone's been there, photographed them and uploaded their images to Flickr.  The images here are the gateway (Work makes you free), the shoes of inmates, the gas chamber and the monument at the site.



Two ideas in one blog entry! Double value today!

Cheers

Ruth

Glimpsing possibilities

Sydney is hilly.  The CBD, too.  Sure, some bits are flat, but the edges slope down to the harbour.  I love it when you get off at Wynyard or Martin Place stations - or you're just walking down towards Circular Quay - and you get, through the office blocks and Victorian sandstone, a glimpse of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Yes, it's there.  Right in the middle of the picture, below the overhanging balcony on the right, past the curved building on the left.  (I'm besotted with the Hipstamatic camera app on my iPhone at present, which accounts for the look of this photo).  The Sydney Opera House is nice, but I love the bridge. 

This photo is kinda like some of these holidays.  I'm working on a study skills program for Year 11 in Term 1, to be delivered weekly.  It's a reshaping of content I've already developed, and a reworking of other content, and a complete reprogramming of timetable/delivery.  It's been a long process of thinking, seeing things gradually coming into focus, getting glimpses of the bridges it can build and the habits/mindsets it can help establish with our new senior students.

I took this photo on a fabulous day in town going to photographic exhibitions.  Annie Leibovitz at the MCA,  Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the Australian Museum and Beach, Bush & Battlers: photographs by Jeff Carter at the State Library of NSW. 

This image (source) is The Drover's Wife by Jeff Carter (it was my favourite).  Here's what the SLNSW says about this exhibition:

The Jeff Carter photographs in Beach, Bush + Battlers have been selected from his remarkable, historically significant archive of over 50,000 works celebrating the lives of everyday Australians in rural, outback, urban and coastal communities dating from the late 1940s through to today.
Curator Sandra Byron, the leading expert on Carter's work, says about the exhibition: 'Carter's iconic images are a testament to his respect for ordinary people and his commitment to the Australian landscape and environment.'

It was a wonderful exhibition.  Worth seeing - it closes 20 Feb.  The other two close in March.  If you can get to Sydney on Australia Day, there are a bunch of other things on in the city too (program here) and one of my favourites is the vintage bus service - a chance to ride through the city on a vintage double-decker bus (for only a gold coin donation).  Just slip slop slap; the weather forecast for Wednesday is for a very hot one.

Why not pass on info about these exhibitions to your Visual Arts/Photography teachers?  And I'm going to be pointing my History and English teachers at the Jeff Carter photos too.  If the Vis Arts people are doing an excursion to Art Express, they could add in one or more of these too.

Cheers

Ruth

Australian Museum: resources for education

While toddling about the Australian Museum site being gobsmacked by science photography, I thought I'd locate a couple more useful links to pop on the blog.

The Education Services site has a bunch of possibilities to explore, including videoconferencing, teacher previews/talks, competitions and more. http://australianmuseum.net.au/education-services

The Collections section is the gateway to exploring an extensive number of options, including biodiversity, natural science collections, interactive science activities, cultural collections and more. http://australianmuseum.net.au/research-and-collections

Also:
Animals http://australianmuseum.net.au/animals
Minerals and fossils http://australianmuseum.net.au/minerals-and-fossils
Cultures (including Australian Aboriginal  and Ancient Egyptian material) http://australianmuseum.net.au/cultures

Worth sharing with your Science staff, Society and Culture teachers, Aboriginal committee/liaison group/Aboriginal studies teachers, History teachers and others.  You don't have to be in Sydney or NSW to make use of many of the resources on the site.

Cheers

Ruth

Draft National Curriculum

The Draft National Curriculum is being launched today by Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard.  Here are some quick links.

• Federal Department of Education National Curriculum page (just a brief outline, then refers you to ACARA)
• ACARA (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, responsible for the documents)
• Want to get involved in the consultation process? Click here.
• Want to read resources, including information sheets from ACARA on each subject? Click here (or if you just want one subject's information sheet: English, Maths, History, Science).

Curriculum drafts:

• Draft Maths curriculum pdf
• Draft Science curriculum pdf
• Draft History pdf
• Draft English pdf

PDF copies of the draft curricula in Maths, Science, History and English are from this Melbourne Herald-Sun article.

(The SMH is apparently very preoccupied today with Spencer Tunick's photography at the Sydney Opera House).

Cheers

Ruth

Magnum photo archive

Magnum agency photographers are responsible for some of the most iconic photographic images, and their roster has included many renowned photographers.  The New York Times has an article about how the physical prints in their archive have found a new home at a university in Texas, highlighting the historical significance of these photos and "their role in helping to create the collective photo bank of modern culture".

Much of their archive has been scanned and is available to view online here.

There is also a 'photo of the week' blog which you might like to put in your blogreader (eg. Bloglines, Google Reader) to see what appears which might be useful for school.  Find it here.

One to share with your teachers of History, Visual Arts, English... and an alternative to Google Images for kids to know, too.

Cheers

Ruth

Google hosts LIFE picture archive

The picture archive from LIFE magazine goes back to the 1750s, and in the twentieth century in particular, includes many iconic images.  The archive is now being hosted by Google - find it here.

Image source.

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The September 11 Digital Archive

The September 11 Digital Archive uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. The Archive contains more than 150,000 digital items, a tally that includes more than 40,000 emails and other electronic communications, more than 40,000 first-hand stories, and more than 15,000 digital images. In September 2003, the Library of Congress accepted the Archive into its collections, an event that both ensured the Archive's long-term preservation and marked the library's first major digital acquisition.

Browse: Explore the collection for stories, images, emails, documents, sounds, and videos of September 11

Research: Search, sort, and examine the entire collection

Contribute: Tell your story, add your email, and upload images, documents, and other digital files to the Archive

Find it here.

From all these thousands of miles away from a field in Pennsylvania, from the Pentagon, from the twin towers, I remember that day seven years ago very clearly.  I wonder how many times I've seen that footage, a plane arcing in, an explosion, a building sinking to its knees...I'd guess, maybe hundreds - not that I've searched it out, it's not just omnipresent in popular culture but also hard to look away from.  One's eyes remain disbelieving, one's heart utterly horrified.

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The invention of children's literature and libraries

Courtesy of Chicken Spaghetti, a link to a fascinating article from the New Yorker about the beginnings of public libraries for children in the US, and the intertwining of the careers of Anne Carroll Moore, librarian for children, and E.B. White, author.

Imagine this world, given our thinking today:

Between 1881 and 1917, Andrew Carnegie underwrote the construction of more than sixteen hundred public libraries in the United States, buildings from which children were routinely turned away, because they needed to be protected from morally corrupting books, especially novels. In 1894, at the annual meeting of the American Library Association, the Milwaukee Public Library’s Lutie Stearns read a “Report on the Reading of the Young.” What if libraries were to set aside special books for children, Stearns wondered, shelved in separate rooms for children, staffed by librarians who actually liked children?

In 1896, Anne Carroll Moore was given the task of running just such an experiment, the Children’s Library of the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, built at a time when the Brooklyn schools had a policy that “children below the third grade do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books.” ...

In each of the library’s branches, Moore abolished age restrictions. Down came the “Silence” signs, up went framed prints of the work of children’s-book illustrators. “Do not expect or demand perfect quiet,” she instructed her staff. “The education of children begins at the open shelves.”

Today, children’s book publishing—an industry richly described in Leonard S. Marcus’s excellent new book, “Minders of Make-Believe”—is one of the most profitable parts of the book business. But that industry exists only because, in much the same way that the nineteenth-century middle class invented childhood as we know it, early-twentieth-century writers, illustrators, editors, and publishers—and, most of all, Anne Carroll Moore—invented children’s literature.

NationStates: online simulation game

To quote from the website:

NationStates is a free nation simulation game. Build a nation and run it according to your own warped political ideals. Create a Utopian paradise for society's less fortunate or a totalitarian corporate police state. Care for your people or deliberately oppress them. Join the World Assembly or remain a rogue state. It's up to you.

Haven't yet created my own nation with it, but it has potential for History/Society and Culture/Geography (so I've pointed those teachers at it so they can see if it's useful). It was devised as a ploy to draw attention to a novel (Jennifer Government by Max Barry).

Check it out by clicking here.

Australian Women's Archives Project

To quote from the website:

Australian Women’s Archives Project

The National Foundation for Australian Women established the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) in 2000, to enhance public knowledge and appreciation of the contribution women and their organisations have made to Australia. To do this, the Project encourages Australian women and their organisations to preserve their records and to make them more accessible to academic, government and community-based researchers, to journalists, to school children as well as to the general enquirer.

AWAP is comprised of two elements:

an on-line Women’s Register, containing biographical data about Australian women and their organisations;
identification of suitable collections of records, and brokering of arrangements for the archiving of these records, in some cases contributing to the costs of indexing the records.
The searchable-on-line Register of the Archives Project is a valuable and growing source of biographical data about Australian women and their organisations, with hyper-links to the archival repositories where their records are held and to other sources of information. Women and women’s organisations are listed alphabetically. You’ll also be able to search by functional classification- P covers physicists, politicians, pharmacists, pacifists and many more.

There is a number of virtual exhibitions on-line (see the sidebar). These exhibitions recognise particular groups of women, such as those who were recipients of awards under the former Imperial Honours system. More virtual exhibitions are being developed.
The Register is a joint project of the National Foundation for Australian Women and the History Department of the University of Melbourne. The eScholarship Research Centre at the University provides technical assistance to the Project.

With the apology to the stolen generations scheduled for Federal Parliament this week, I was searching for information on Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Here's the AWAP page on her, to give you an idea of its comprehensive data.