Learning by Viewing: Diversity Lessons on Videotape

Abstract

Several recently produced videotapes may be used as resources for diversity training workshops and in classrooms where topics of diversity are addressed. Blue Eyed is a provocative, illuminating, in-your-face videotape that examines the impact of racial discrimination on people's lives. It is one of the strongest presentations on the subject I have witnessed. This 93minute experience is an opportunity to sit in on part of a full-length diversity workshop conducted by Jane Elliot. Elliot structures the workshop so that a group of 40 typical (white, middle-class) midwestern adults experience first-hand the impact of systematic discriminatory attitudes and behaviors. Her strategies are based on an experiment with her thirdgrade class in 1968 in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Negative stereotypes were assigned to the participants and they were deliberately exposed to negative behaviors and expectations based solely on their eye color. Elliot explained that she chose eye color as the criterion because it is genetically determined in the same way that skin color is determined. This video challenges traditional judgments that society makes on people who are different. There are several opportunities for learning through Elliot's direct teaching and incidental comments. Solid arguments are presented in both emotional and scholarly manners. It is obvious that she is invested in what she is striving to teach. Even though the viewer knows that the experiment shown in the videotape is staged, it is easy to become caught up in the emotional atmosphere and implications underlying the observed behavior. Less than an hour into the video, one blue-eyed subject is already crying. It is a very potent moment when a defiant white man breaks under the pressure and begins to cry. The primary emphasis of this video is racial discrimination but Elliot attempts to connect to class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability.