When students say openly prejudiced things

[lokifan]

So, on Wednesday I’m going to run a professional-development workshop at my school, for my colleagues (i.e. other teachers) on how to react when students say openly bigoted stuff. So not the subtle things (although that’s also a massive issue) but like, using slurs, or ‘in Algeria we don’t have any gays because we kill them’, or ‘bisexual people are just greedy and selfish’, or ‘being gay is a birth defect’. (All RL examples from my classroom! Anti-Semitism and xenophobia also crop up semi-regularly, and racism every so often.)

It’s a tiny little forty-minute session, so I’m going to start off with what made me think about the topic and the school policy, then teachers discuss in pairs, then we discuss as a group, then I round it off with some tips and ideas. Most of the discussion will be different techniques for responding to this in the classroom, what we’ve tried and what’s worked, and also what the goal is - i.e. do we want to be ‘neutral arbiters’ (hint those don’t exist and also no), are we changing hearts and minds, do we just want the student to shut up, etc.

Keep in mind I teach at a language school, all my students are studying English as a foreign language and most are adults who are explicitly in London to learn some British culture too. I’m happy to host a wider discussion, though, and interested to hear POVs and difficulties from the various state school teachers and university lecturers I know.

Basically, I’d love to know if you have any thoughts! And not just from teachers - you're all former or even current students. I have thoughts of my own but I’ll keep those to the comment replies...

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I have had this happen in class too -- I teach at the college level in the USA. I usually set ground rules ahead of time when I know the topics will be covered that I hope preclude those kinds of out and out blunt awful statements. But I have also had to interrupt and tell students that they can't say what they just said in my class.

I've also gone to them after class, one on one, to explain what was wrong with what they said.

Looking forward to the comments.

[lokifan]

Yeah, that makes sense. With slurs I've always gone for "you can't say that in my classroom" but I've also not had adults say it - I mean, with slurs I still would, but it's also a lot more comfortable for me with teenagers because classroom-management stuff where you make them stop behaving badly is already a thing with them.

I usually set ground rules ahead of time when I know the topics will be covered that I hope preclude those kinds of out and out blunt awful statements

Very helpful. Part of the problem for me is that when this stuff comes up, it's almost never - I think actually never? - been because I was planning to discuss the topic. Teenagers in particular bring up queer stuff all on their own because ~ooooh deviant sexuality, and some of my adult students do that a bit too - oooooh how thrillingly shocking the UK is.

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, depending on how much time was left and how drastically it would make the class veer away from the content, I have either just stopped in the moment and said, "That word is not allowed in my classroom" or sometimes I can get into a full fledged discussion of the issue. If it's a spontaneous comment it is of course impossible to plan for except in the most general way.

[igrockspock]

I'd forgotten that lovely aspect of teaching ESL. When I taught in Japan, it was usually enough to say, "Westerners think that kind of statement is very rude." I used to have a business English lesson that started with "If a foreigner did _______ in a meeting, I wouldn't want to work with them." Then I'd use that to say, "Okay, let's talk about this the other way around. In America, if you insult someone's race, religion, or sexual orientation, people won't want to do business with you." You could probably start the same kind of conversation with "if a foreigner did _______ at a party in my country, nobody would want to talk to them."

Of course, as a high school teacher, I can be a lot more strict since my students aren't paying customers. My response would usually be something like, "I am so shocked and disappointed you made that statement because you know that respecting everyone is our number one rule. Wait for me in the hallway so that we can discuss the consequences for your behavior."

[lokifan]

Yeah, I've developed simple scripts which rely on that - so basically some combination of "I disagree", "we don't say that here" [here can be London, the UK, or simply the school or classroom], and "that's very rude in English". Especially since the last phrase allows you to sound neutral if you want - like, I said that to a student who used "whore" in the classroom, and even aside from the sexism it's true that we culturally wouldn't use that word in polite company!

Yeah. We can and do actually do the "have a word outside of class" thing with blatant discrimination, but it's not been the case anywhere else I've taught, really; when I have done the "no slurs in my classroom" thing (always with teenagers - adults have gone for other forms of being awful, mostly I think because they've almost never been trolling, whereas teenagers are generally being deliberately provocative) it's been with the knowledge that leadership won't necessarily back me up.