Although residing in different historical time period and social contexts, Jane Elliott’s third grade classroom, documented in A Class Divided, as well as the workshop she run in Britain, disseminated through British TV program, The Event: How Racist Are You? illustrate how different forces and power relations play out in schools and in the society. The pedagogical practices Jane Elliott employed mean to construct emancipatory knowledge, but they had their limitations due to the constrain of participants' backgrounds.
Jane Elliot’s three-day experiment first conducted in 1970 reproduces society’s black-white racial dynamic in her classroom. It allows her students to understand abstract concepts like prejudice, power and discrimination through their personal participation in the learning experiences. Dividing her students up deliberately according to their eye colors, Jane Elliott first constructed a superior group identity for the blue-eyed students by allocating them institutionalized privileges such as recess time, access to playground equipment, and getting seconds at lunch. By pointing out that a girl belonging to the brown-eye group took a longer period of time to get ready, Jane Elliott modeled the process of prejudice-and-stereotype-generation: when negative prejudgments of individuals were drawn based on unsound evidences, and when individual acts were generalized as a trait shared by everyone in the artificially-assigned group. The experiment revealed the irrational and artificial nature of racial divisions, which were constructed in the same way as the students were divided up by their eye colors, and allowed the students to gain the experience of being subordinated under such divisions.
Students in Jane Elliott’s classroom were exposed to knowledge that transformed their understanding of the social relationships manipulated by power and privilege and had a long-lasting impact on their lives. 15 years after the experiment, at their reunion, the students talked how they learned not to judge people based on their race and expressed frustration when catching themselves or others doing the opposite. Since all the students are in the dominant racial group, although their mentality changed, they did not see the need to pursue actions to change the social structure around them that was still perpetuating the injustice. The experiment has its limitations.
In Jane Elliott’s classroom, the reconstruction of group identities based on eye colors functioned due to her dominance of the class. In the very short amount of time, unlike the hundreds and thousands of years it took for racial, sexual and other biases to emerge and consolidate, Elliott had to make everyone comply to the rules she set and follow her lead to perpetuate the newly-born prejudices. The experiment ran smoothly in Jane Elliott’s third grade classroom due to her role as the teacher who had established authority among her students and owned the resources and skills to manipulate them. In a different setting, when Elliott lacks those resources that help her to manipulate the participants, the experiment might fail to achieve its goals. Elliott has dedicated her life as an anti-racism trainer and has been running “blue eyes brown eyes” workshops all over the world. The recent workshop she conducted in the U.K. saw objections from the participants—adults who questioned the purpose of the experiment, arguing that racism no longer existed in the U.K., and refused to cooperate. When working with sophisticated adults, Elliot’s experiment has the potential to work against its purpose and fails to deal with the more subtle and complicated racial landscape in the 21st century.
Jane Elliott’s experiments showcase the power of experiential learning. Despite their limitations, they have proved that with creativity and dedication, teachers can transform schools from an alienating space where hyper-instrumentalized knowledge is imparted to a hotbed where students’ love for knowledge and passion for justice could be seeded.
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