EDUCATION | Driving tomorrow’s achievements
10 December 2008
Group Touts Mix It Up at Lunch Day as Diversity, Tolerance Tool
The Southern Poverty Law Center offers free materials
Washington — What’s the most important step a teacher can take toward encouraging tolerance in the classroom?
“The very first thing is that you have to be open,” says Samantha Elliott Briggs, the director of Mix It Up at Lunch Day for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “If you’re not open to change, or to creating change, it’s never going to work.”
Mix It Up at Lunch Day is part of a national campaign to encourage students to question and cross social boundaries. Students celebrate diversity and tolerance by eating lunch at a table where they don’t usually sit, with the aim of meeting — or “mixing it up” with — a different group of students. (See “Kids Celebrate Diversity and Tolerance by ‘Mixing It Up’ at Lunch.”)
“You have to be creative, you have to make it fun and engaging,” said Briggs. “You have to have some level of enthusiasm ... for the children to want to participate and to have an open mind and enthusiasm.”
“It’s a lesson that everyone can learn. This is something we all need to do,” Briggs said. “The bottom line is providing a safe space for kids and allowing them to be.”
The SPLC encourages schools to survey their students about such issues as: Are people in the school friendly to all kinds of people? What are the main groups in school? Would you be willing to help people from different groups get along better by introducing yourself to someone new? Sitting with someone different at lunch? Dancing with someone from a different group?
Such surveys have revealed that 70 percent of students see the cafeteria as the school setting where social boundaries are most clearly drawn.
In planning for Mix It Up at Lunch Day, schools are encouraged to involve students, teachers, counselors, staff, administrators and school clubs: Put the event on the school calendar, pull together a group of students who want to challenge the social boundaries at school, form a planning committee, and find a way to recognize students who participate.
The Mix It Up Web site offers a variety of ideas for publicizing the event as well as free fliers, stickers and Web banners.
A planner available on the Web site explains not only how to organize Mix It Up at Lunch Day, but also provides boundary-crossing lesson plans and activities for kindergarten through grade 12 throughout the year.
“Mix it Up starts there in the cafeteria trying to empower youth to take a stand, move across the cafeteria,” Briggs said. “If for no other day, do it for one day.”
She acknowledged that some of the kids see the icebreakers, silly games or activities and discussion as a distraction or as “something ‘they are making us do.’”
“Many come to it with an attitude, but by the time it’s over, it’s something they either keep internally or they share with an adult ally or friend: ‘you know it really wasn’t that bad; it was actually a good idea and maybe we should do this more often.’”
While some schools have just a Mix It Up at Lunch, others have what Briggs refers to as a “megamix,” where every single classroom teacher hosts an activity that teaches tolerance.
A school in Rhode Island that Briggs visited in 2007 invited elected officials to come to the lunch, with the result that the attorney general, the local director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the chiefs of police and fire departments were on hand to reinforce the message that tolerance is important.
As an example of a Mix It Up activity, Briggs cited one of six different workshops used in a Boston school. The kids were divided into two teams, one red, one blue, and each team chose a team captain, who was then blindfolded and sent out into the hallway. The remaining members of the two teams then scattered pieces of blue and red paper all over the floor. The two blindfolded captains then were brought back into the room and had to follow their teammates’ directions in picking up only the color designated for their group.
“The kids were laughing and cheering and having an awfully good time,” Briggs recalled. “When they were done and they took the blindfolds off and the teacher kind of debriefed them, they made sure they did what we call ‘dig deeper’: What’s the real meaning behind this? What would it be like to live in a color-blind society?”
The SPLC provides free Mix It Up materials and encourages treating it as more than a one-day event. There are film kits on the Holocaust, youth activism in the civil rights movement, the story of civil rights heroine Rosa Parks and the civil rights era in general.
“We try really hard to keep the digital divide in mind and the variation in resources that one school might have over another, and we try to keep things simple,” said Briggs.
The Mix-It-Up 2008-2009 Planner (50 pages, PDF) is available on the SPLC Web site, as are other activity booklets for teaching tolerance.
The SPLC also has more than 400,000 subscribers to its award-winning Teaching Tolerance magazine, the latest issue of which includes articles ranging from challenging misperceptions about the African continent to an essay by President-elect Barack Obama. Its Teaching Tolerance Web site offers many suggestions for ways to fight hate in a variety of settings including home and school.
For more information on the Teaching Tolerance project or Mix It Up at Lunch Day, see the SPLC Web site.
