Classroom Activities on Perspective Taking
Every perception a person has is based upon their own personal
experience. People perceive the world differently because no two people
have the same experiences. Experience makes us who we are. It shapes
our minds and opinions, our likes and dislikes. Therefore, it is
difficult to have one ideal definition of certain concepts, such as
justice, virtue, and an ideal society. Our experiences color our
opinions of people different than ourselves and even our opinion of the
dark. The only way to create one perception of reality would be to
systematically force everyone to have the same experiences. Fortunately, by using the kind of perception checking skills explored earlier, we can do our best to understand how others are experiencing the world and we can avoid misinterpreting their behavior.
Learning Activities
The following activities from the CRE Curriculum materials developed by the Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management can provide you and your students with fun and interactive ways to look at perception and perspective taking.
Seeing Different Things in the Same Image
Understanding that we all may view things differently at one point or another is a part of life. Although we may see things differently, this does not necessarily mean that your perception is wrong and mine is right.
The following activity (available as a pdf) is aimed to
show your students that we may all perceive an event differently. This
exercise is designed for high school students.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License
Brought to you by CReducation.org