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Stereotypes And Prejudice Essay

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How does this work?
At first I had to distinguish the difference between a stereotype and being prejudice. According to the authors of our text Sensoy and DiAngelo, prejudice is a “learned prejudgment about members of social groups to which we don’t belong.” It is also based on limited knowledge about a group of people. Judgments are made based on these prejudices and applied to everyone in a social group. The learned prejudgment that our authors are talking about is what is referred to as a stereotype. A stereotype is a belief about a certain group of people, while prejudice is a feeling based on their membership to a certain group with a stereotype.
One part of our authors’ definition on p.29 made me stop and think for a moment. …show more content…

Gaining knowledge about a social group is a path to minimizing the effect of our prejudice, which can lead to discrimination.
One of our assignments assigned in the course called the “Funds of Knowledge” I believe is a way to get us to gain knowledge about a social group within our school and see how we can use this knowledge to minimize the effect that our stereotypes in our classroom.
What explicit and implicit valuing of certain groups (p. 30) do you notice in your school or elsewhere? Are there social benefits and penalties associated with them?
I don’t know if I see a lot of explicit valuing of any group of students at my school. I know through the Positive Behavior Intervention Support initiative explicit praise is given for following procedures and meeting expectations.
I think I see more implicit valuing being done. This could be in the form of using stereotypes of social groups when it comes to dealing with parents. I have heard teachers talking about parents and placing them in stereotypes before getting to know them. An example would be “oh yeah my new student’s parents just moved into Shadow Brook”. This is another way of saying they are poor, because that area is low

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