We’re well into our apartheid unit in IB history, and what better activity to do than a good old fashioned simulation?!
I divided the students into 2 groups. 5 students were assigned “Wizards”, while 27 students were given the role of “Muggles”. The primary job of the Muggles was to earn money to support their starving family. The Wizards demonstrated cruelty and oppression by forcing the Muggles to complete odd jobs for money (Mr. Tran dollars, of course). That money would eventually be taxed by the Wizards. The students that were unable to pay the tax ended up in jail, a sectioned off corner of the room guarded by other Muggles. Needless to say, the cycle of oppression and subjugation was meant to give students the capacity to understand how desperate the people in South Africa were during apartheid to support their families. None of the students rebelled in the process of the simulation, which mirrored many of the lack of resistance movements during the 50’s and 60’s.
Anyway, it was a pretty chaotic experience overall, with some of the odd jobs being pretty funny, including public embarassment and of course moving everyone’s backpack into a corner. Still, the students seemed to enjoy it. In all honestly, the simulation worked better last year when I had classes of 21 students respectively. 33 students is a bit too much of a mess to coordinate and keep track of, but the students still seemed to enjoy it, even if they probably didn’t learn much in the process. I’ll have to recruit more students next year to get more sections of IB.
I acknowledge the obvious though – that no simulation is really going to translate well to an authentic experience. Because I wouldn’t really want to do that to my students and subject them to a real life Stanford Prison Experiment.
But I’m still grateful to have a set of students I’m willing to take creative risks with, even if the lessons sometimes fall flat in the process.
