1. facinghistory.org

2. Note to Teachers: Getting Started
This PowerPoint presentation accompanies Lesson 6: Responding to Difference from the Standing Up for Democracy scheme of work. It is important to read the lesson plan in order to understand its rationale and extension activities, as well as the information about materials in the Notes to Teachers section.
This presentation includes verbal instructions for the activities in the Notes beneath each slide. Accessing hyperlinks in PowerPoint involves extra steps: select View - Notes Page - right click on the hyperlink - and select Open Hyperlink. Alternatively, you can access the hyperlinks from Lesson 6: Responding to Difference or by viewing the presentation in Google Slides.
While you may need to modify this presentation to meet the needs of your students, please note that Facing History and Ourselves is not accountable for any changes that alter the presentation's content or original layout.
Information about Standing Up for Democracy PowerPoint Slides
Each PowerPoint accompanies a corresponding lesson plan that includes more detailed instructions about the activities and should be read in advance of teaching the lesson.
Wherever possible, we have used images in lieu of writing to encourage the verbal delivery of instructions as a means of boosting focus and to promote active listening skills.
The same image is used for each recurring teaching strategy throughout the scheme of work to facilitate recall and promote student independence.

3. Responding to Difference

4. Guiding Questions
How do we learn which differences between people matter and which do not?
How do we respond to difference?
Responding to Difference: Learning Objective
Students will categorise the many ways in which humans respond when encountering difference and use this information to write creatively in response to the question, “What do we do with a variation?”

5. Responding to Difference
What are some of the ways that people respond when they encounter an individual or group that seems different from them?
What are some of the reasons for the different responses people might have to those who are different from them?
How do we learn about which differences between people matter in our society and which do not?
To introduce students to the themes in this lesson’s reading, ask them to respond in their journals to the questions.
Then ask students to think, pair, share their responses before bringing the class together.
Ask each pair to share one of the ways people respond when they encounter difference and to record their ideas on flipchart paper.

6. “What Do We Do With a Variation?” by James Berry
What do we do with a difference?
Do we stand and discuss its oddity
or do we ignore it?
Do we shut our eyes to it
or poke it with a stick?
Do we clobber it to death?
Do we move around it in rage
and enlist the rage of others?
Do we will it to go away?
Do we look at it in awe
or purely in wonderment?
Do we work for it to disappear?
Do we pass it stealthily
or change route away from it?
Do we will it to become like ourselves?
Do we communicate to it,
let application acknowledge it
for barriers to fall down?
“What Do We Do With a Variation?” by James Berry
Tell students that they will now read a poem by James Berry about the many ways we respond when we encounter a difference. Explain that while Berry was born in rural Jamaica in 1924, he moved to Britain in 1948 where he lived until his death in 2017.
Pass out and read aloud What Do We Do With Difference?
Try reading it a few different ways.
Perhaps you can read it out loud the first time, so that students get a sense of the rhythm of the poem.
Next, using popcorn or wraparound, which are explained on the Read Aloud teaching strategies page, have students read the poem out loud sentence by sentence.
Finally, have them read it a third time, line by line.
Ask students to share their ideas about which way of reading the poem they prefered and why.

7. “What Do We Do With a Variation?”
Ask students to discuss in a Think, Pair, Share activity what they think the poem is about based on their first impressions of the text. You might ask them to discuss the following questions from How to Read a Poem (this link is external).
What circumstances do you think gave rise to the poem? Why did James Berry write it?
What does the title of the poem suggest?

8. Divide the class into groups of 3–4 students.
Pass out the envelopes with What Do We Do With Variation? Question Sort sentence strips and some Post-it notes or index cards.
Tell the students that they should sort the strips into categories of similar kinds of responses. Then they should create a label for each category and write it on a Post-it note or index card (for example, “Fear,” “Indifference”). They might start by creating piles of responses to difference and then labelling them. Or they might create their categories first and then organise their strips into them.
Regardless of their chosen process, students should work together with their group members to complete this task.

9. Which lines of the poem were easiest to categorise and which ones were the most difficult? Why do you think some responses to difference were easier or harder than others to place in a category?
Which of your categories had the most and the fewest examples from the poem? What might you attribute to this difference?
Can you think of any specific examples (in your school, your local community, or the world) of the different ways that Berry says humans respond to difference? Why do you think people respond in these ways?
What are other ways that humans respond to difference that Berry does not acknowledge in his poem?
What is the message of Berry’s poem? What does he want his reader to understand about humans and human behaviour when responding to difference?
After the groups have organised the lines of the poem into categories of responses, project the five questions one at a time and ask groups to discuss them together.
After groups have finished their discussions, ask them to share one interesting take-away from the activity and their discussion. Alternatively, you might facilitate a more in-depth class discussion about one or more of the questions.

10. Ask students to take a moment to envision how they would like their school community to respond to the differences between its members.
You might ask them to close their eyes and visualise the response they would like to see (rather than what they perhaps have seen or experienced).
Then tell students that they will end the lesson by writing an additional three-line stanza that describes their vision for how they would like their school community or local community to respond to a difference today. They can follow the pattern of Berry’s poem by starting the first line of their stanza with “Do we ,” finishing the question in line two, and then adding an additional question in line three. You might choose to have pairs work on this task, or ask students to create their own stanzas in their journals.

11. Invite students to share their stanzas in a wraparound or gallery walk.

12. Extension Activity

13. In the reading Understanding Strangers, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski and Moroccan scholar Fatema Mernissi reflect on the ways in which we respond to difference, both in ancient times and today. Similarly, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, considers how we confront the “Other” when he shares his three models for integration in the reading Three Parables of Integration. These two readings pair well with each other and with James Berry’s “What Do We Do with a Variation?”
As an extension activity after teaching Berry’s poem, assign students to each author. They can read the selection on their own or with a partner.
Then have them discuss the connection questions for their author in small “expert” groups.
Finally, jigsaw the students into “teaching” groups so that each group has two students with each reading.
Students should summarise their readings and then compare and contrast Kapuscinski’s three ideas for how we might respond to the “Other” with Sack’s three models for integration.
Finally, lead a class discussion where students compare the readings with Berry’s poem. They can rank all of the responses to difference in the three readings from the most inclusive to least inclusive and discuss where they see evidence of these responses in their own school and local communities.

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