Socio-Cultural Stereotypes: Exploring Students’ Perceptions Regarding Social Issues

Abstract

This research started from the need of looking for ways to involve learners dynamically in classroom activities, including social issues. The study was developed with ten students (10) in tenth grade. It was carried out to explore tenth graders’ perceptions on gender, race and social class to report their socio-cultural stereotypes through the development of a project work called “Stereotyping our Culture” divided into three (3) workshops, where students dealt with different Colombian social issues while they were learning English. Data collection sources incorporated field notes to record events and ideas for further reflection, video-taping to get accurate students’ perceptions to confirm our impressions reported in the field notes and artifacts from workshops to perceive what students wanted to express by means of drawings or writings.

Keywords

• Culture
• perceptions
• social stereotypes
• project work