As part of the 2019 Family Festival, the BIA team had the wonderful opportunity to spread awareness about our service to an audience that included parents and family members. Through this opportunity, we interacted and listened to what members of the UWCSEA community had to say about gender inequality.
To do this, we had to think critically about the different audiences we could reach in school. For example, we identified that there were as many Junior Schoolers as High Schoolers, so we needed an activity that would be appealing to students of a wide age range to help us achieve our goal of interacting meaningfully with them. Through the process of brainstorming in meetings, we built on each other’s ideas and offered a constructive critique. We decided on a game we called “Binning the Bias”. In this game, people would write down stereotypes that they had heard about gender on a piece of paper, then scrunch it up and try to throw it into a bin. After successfully “binning the bias” we would straighten out the scrunched up paper and put it up on board, collating and showcasing all the other biases people had written. By literally doing away with stereotypes, participants were encouraged to act upon them.
We chose this activity because gender stereotyping has been a frequent underlying issue that we have been discussing in our meetings, so we thought that it was important to address this in the game. We decided to hang the scrunched up papers up after the game so others could see what everyone had written.
One thing that we noticed when running the stall was how many primary schoolers participated in our activity. Even though accessibility was one of our initial worries, we had some very meaningful conversations with primary schoolers and felt grateful to have reached them. Many of them had not yet understood what ‘stereotyping’ meant, even though they were still able to come up with examples of gender biases. Being able to educate the younger students felt rewarding as we were able to spread awareness about the issues we find important to students outside of our normal audience in the High School. As a Focus Group that has the privilege and responsibility of being a forum to discuss gender inequality, we felt fortunate to include a wider range of students and hope to continue doing so.
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