I posed the following question to a group of Talented and Gifted Students: “What might be some advantages or disadvantages, if you awoke to find you belong to a different ethnic group than you did when you went to sleep?”
Their collective verbal response was “silence.” Individual facial expressions and body language revealed confusion, embarrassment, caution and perhaps, even fear about relating the stereotypical images that they have come to know of each others cultures. Further exploration through “what if” questions suggested, to me, that they knew so little of each other’s cultures that the question was better left unexplored, within that setting. So begins this unit.
