16/02/2016 – Tuesday
Yvonne spent an hour with Sandra Snavely’s Psychology class. The class was looking at Child Development in the area of identity and belonging. Yvonne started off with an activity using social and cultural objects as triggers. Reflecting on this activity afterwards the students said that it was the first time that they had a conversation with each other as a class.
The class then broke into groups of three, one to act as recorder and the other two to exchange stories based the puppet characters that they had been given. After this all the stories were shared by the whole group.
The class was very varied in background from Syrian and Afghan refugees to conservative white republican and evangelical liberal African-american from a hard childhood. There was a woman doctor from Iraq who had delivered a Chinese woman of a baby on the plane from Iraq. Also there were a number of Mexican immigrants in the class.
The issues that surface in the discussion were mainly about immigration, the gun laws and some of the barriers to friendship and hospitality.