Activity Five

This activity is to accompany Unit One of the Curriculum Guide.

Incorporating the C.E.L.s:

• Independent Learning
• Critical & Creative Thinking
• Personal & Social Values & Skills

Concepts Application Lesson for:

• Human Rights
• Social Darwinism
• Paternalism
• National Power

This concept application activity provides students with an opportunity to investigate the nineteenth century European perception about non-white populations and cultures and the "reality" of those cultures. The students will gain an awareness of the effect perceptions (paradigms) have on the actions of people and nations.

Knowledge Objectives

The student will

• know that the colonial powers of the late 19th century perceived the people the cultures and people they colonized as being "primitive";
• know that this perception of the colonized people guided the behaviour and defined the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized;
• know that the cultures being colonized did posses sophisticated social structures and had developed technologies suited to their environments; and,
• know that it is difficult to develop accurate generalizations about groups of people.

Skills Development

The student will:

• learn to relate evidence and assumptions to an argument and/or conclusions;
• learn to distinguish relevant from irrelevant data and logical from illogical statements;
• practise identifying connections, interactions and arrangement of parts; and,
• practise identifying cause-effect, part-whole, and analogous relationships.

Values Objectives

The student will:

• discuss the basis on which generalizations should be made about groups of people;
• determine when a generalization becomes a prejudice;
• discuss the attributes which help define what it means to be human;
• discuss whether one particular attribute best defines what it means to be human; and,
• discuss whether one race of humans possesses more of certain attributes than another race.

Outline of the Activity

Step One

Provide student groups with short descriptions of the history, culture, philosophy and intellectual contributions of some of the cultural groups listed.

North American Indigenous Peoples

• religion
• social organization

Islamic people of the Middle East

• Islam
• contributions: algebra, architecture

Indian subcontinent

• Hinduism
• Buddhism
• intellectual achievements

Using the information derived from the above groups, have the students evaluate the comments of the 19th century Europeans concerning the colonized peoples.

Each student group is to select one of the 19th century paradigms and evaluate the implications of applying that paradigm to the colonized people.

• The group is to prepare a dialectical argument (report) focusing on whether the outcomes of the application of the paradigm were positive or negative. The group is to arrive at a conclusion and be prepared to present their findings to the class for debate and discussion.