Students might write letters to educational publishers. They can also work with the librarian, administration, and the PTA, to encourage a more diverse collection of books and ensure that a broader range of educators, students, and community members are included in future decision-making. Students use CD ROM encyclopedias in their classrooms or libraries to gather data on the length of the selections for many famous people, based on their gender, and race. A group of students tours the school to collect and graph data on the images that appear on the school and classroom walls. Students analyze the data on the basis of gender, race, class or disability, comparing percentages of voices and images represented in each category with the population in their class, at their school site, in their state, and in their country.
Students analyze entire newspaper stories.
They can outline in one color all the stories about violence and crime, for example, and use another color to outline stories about people working for justice and peace. Similarly, one can highlight how many times people of color are featured in stories of crime or drug-addiction, and how many times they are portrayed positively. In each case, encourage students to use math skills of simple computation, averages, percents, and graphing to create displays on bulletin boards. Be sure to ask students to consider how these images affect the way they feel and how the decisions are made about which images or stories appear. Students can then take action against any inequities they might discover by writing to the newspapers or publishers and using their findings to teach younger children about the bias they detected.