Education Commons^™

The Persona Doll Project: Promoting Diversity Awareness Among Preservice Teachers Through Storytelling, Mary Ellin Logue, V. Susan Bennett-Armistead, Soojoung Kim

Child Development and Family Relations Faculty Scholarship

The Persona Doll Project describes an experiential intervention with undergraduate preservice teachers designed to increase awareness about diversity and apply this awareness to curriculum planning and advocacy for children. Sixty-three undergraduate students in a social studies methods class were each assigned a persona doll for the semester whose background differed from their own. Each was charged with becoming the advocate for the child, represented by the doll, by telling informed stories that would help other students better understand a level of diversity beyond what they knew from their own lives. Students heightened awareness of their own assumptions through narrative, inquiry …

Weapons Of Minor Destruction, Marc Baranowski

Child Development and Family Relations Faculty Scholarship

The calculated rampage of two boys has left four classmates and a teacher dead and 11 others wounded at a middle school in Arkansas. It is a shocking, chilling disaster that begs for explanation. But there are no easy answers or quick solutions to violence as devastating as the murder of children by other children.

A wise sage once said, "When a society gets sick, teen-agers are the most likely to show the symptoms." American society suffers from a chronic disease not covered by most HMOs. I call this disease "LOV" -- Love Of Violence, and the Arkansas incident is …