Sociology 1101, Exercise One

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Viewing Assignment: Watch the video, "A Class Divided," which is available in five segments online from Frontline (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/). Look in the right hand column under "Frontline Classics" to find "A Class Divided," and wat ch all five segments before completing the written assignment. The video describes an experiment carried out many years ago in the elementary school classroom of Jane Elliott, who came up with a way to turn one group of students against another based on skin color. Elliott later left teaching (in part driven out by the hostility of her Iowa community, not only towards here but towards her parents and children). She became a race relations trainer, and the last two segments of show her carrying out a training for staff members from the Iowa Corrections Department. This video certainly relates to a later course lesson about race relations, but here, I am particularly interested in what it shows us about the social forces and the power of social situations to affect human behavior, sometimes for the worse.

Question 1 Briefly describe how Elliott turned kids against one another based on eye color. What gave her the power to do this, and how did the kids themselves help to make it happen?

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Question 2 Describe and analyze the "role set" of an elementary school student. In other words, who are the important people in his or her life as a student? What are the pressures and expectations that come to bear on each student as a result of their role set, and how does that help to account for the power of what they experience here.?
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Question 3
3. What about the race relations training Elliott carries out for the Iowa Department of Corrections? How does she use social forces to create a powerful experience for the participants (try to use the concept of role set in your explanation)? What is the experience like for each of the two groups--the oppressed and the oppressors? What do you think Elliott is trying to teach them, and how successful is she?

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Question 4
4. How do you suppose sociologists might try to evaluate the effectiveness of Elliott's training program for adults (like the one she did for the Iowa Department of Corrections)? (The UMD libary, by the way, has a video about a more recent training she did in Australia, where the main race relations issue is the relationship between the white majority and the aboriginal population--"The Stole Eye"). How do you see the ethical issues in her work, first with the grade school children and more recently as a race relations trainer? What do you think might be the strengths and weaknesses of her approach, compared with other methods of trying to improve race relations?

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