Google Should…

A quick idea, inspired by these adverts made by unwomen.org, designed to highlight how different societies view the role of women. After having taught the model verbs, I think this would be a very thought-provoking way of putting them into context for your students.

Start by asking them to complete sentences beginning with women or men followed by a conditional sentence. For example (and I stress, these are not my beliefs. In fact I disagree with all of them!):

Men should drive.

Women shouldn’t be unmarried after 30.

Women can cook better than men.

Men can’t multitask.

After they’ve written them, and you’ve checked to make sure they’re okay, put them in groups to compare and discuss their sentences.

If you have Internet access in your classroom, you can follow this up by asking your students to google the sentence stems and see what they find. This could lead to an interesting discussion on how sexism is ingrained into society, and how men and women’s roles are defined in different cultures.

It would also be interesting to ask them to do an equivalent search in their own language to compare the results. If you don’t have access to the Internet, you could ask them to search at home and discuss the results in the next class.

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3 thoughts on “Google Should…

  1. I like the idea, James. In fact, there's much you can do with Google's predictive search strings like this. It's worth mentioning to students that these may not represent actual frequency of use…

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