"On the day after Martin Luther King was killed, I––one of my students came into the room and said they shot a king last night, Mrs. Elliott, why'd they shoot that king? I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talking about it, because we had talked about racism since the first day of school. But the shooting of Martin Luther King, who had been one of our heroes of the month in February, could not just be talked about and explained away. There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa. ...
I decided at that point that it was time to try the eye color thing, which I had thought about many, many times but had never used. So the next day I introduced an eye color exercise in my classroom and split the class according to eye color. And immediately created a microcosm of society in a third–grade classroom."
(Jane Elliott, 1985, PBS)
Frontline "A Class Divided": Season 3, Episode 9, A Class Divided (26 Mar. 1985), Director: William Peters, Writers: Charlie Cobb, William Peters.
"A learning activity has a certain internal structure, binding together the characteristics generated by the analytical process of comparison. The internal structure will have a form that could also have existence in a computational form, such as a generic, customisable shell. An analogy would be Microsoft's Powerpoint programme. It has an internal structure that sequences slides, which are themselves customisable by the teacher. The programme is a very restricted form of learning activity model for a purely presentational form of teaching. The internal structure is important, because it defines how the characteristics work together. In the case of Powerpoint, it restricts what can count as a slide. A better shell would allow the teacher to incorporate Flash animations, for example."
(Diana Laurillard, 2002)