This activity works well for students who are middle-school aged and up. Direct students to listen for derogatory language in school and in their social circles. This includes language that is prejudicial or stereotypical regarding gender, race, sexual orientation and religious groups. Students should be instructed to simply listen and write down the comments to be used at a later time. You can ask the students to bring their notes to class for a discussion on what they heard or to write a short paper about the experience.
This activity can be used to help students learn how to properly and appropriately respond to situations where they encounter prejudice. Write out multiple scenarios in which prejudice occurs, for example, an elderly grandmother commenting that being gay is not natural. Give the students a handout with the scenarios and ask them to act them out in front of the class. Ask how they would respond to the comments in ways that are polite but that stand up for the individual or group being prejudiced against. Ask for alternative reactions from the rest of the group once the person has acted out the scenario.
Ask students to write down instances of prejudice that they observe in the media, including video games, television, movies and the Internet for one week. After keeping this log for a week, have them write a paper about their observations and experiences with this activity. They can bring their papers into class to have a discussion on how the experience affected them and what they learned from doing this.
For this activity you will need a number of pictures of different types of people. Divide the group into smaller groups of two to four people. Give each group three to five images of people of various ethnicities doing different types of activities. Have the groups write down information about each person such as where he lives, what his job is and what kind of life he has. Have each group choose one image to present to the larger group. Ask the larger group to find any assumptions that the small groups made about the individuals based on prejudice.