Beyond Tolerant - Revise and Decolonize

Through this activity, students engage with problematic statements from a series of different artifacts as a way of analyzing how dominant cultural stereotypes infect everyday discourse, then offering revisions designed to make the texts more inclusive.

Author: Harriett Jernigan

Course: PWR 1 or PWR 2

Activity length and schedule: Any time during the quarter; this activity would take students at least 30 minutes to complete.

Activity goals:

To help students practice critical and rhetorical reading
To encourage students to engage in rhetorical analysis of a text
To increase awareness of the way cultural assumptions influence language and the delivery of ideas
To suggest the power of revision as part of anti-racist practices

Activity details: Students analyze several cultural artifacts (a page from a nursing textbook; a news article; and information graphic) to uncover where dominant discourses reaffirm dominant-culture beliefs and assumptions and then suggestion revisions to make each more inclusive.

See the student-facing handout here.