Creative Lesson: Teaching Inequality and Exploitation in Sing to the Dawn

This lesson was aimed at Secondary 2 Normal Academic students and the purpose of the lesson was for students to understand what inequality and exploitation were and how they existed in Sing to the Dawn.

In the first part of the lesson, I identified five students and grouped them into Group A and named them  "Radollans" while I told the rest of the class that they were all part of the same group known as "Gaverills".

Instructions for the Gaverills were as follows:
Each student was to walk up to me individually and collect 1 sweet then return to his/her seat. Each person will have to repeat this three times.

While the Gaverills were doing this, the Radollans were instructed to sit down, relax and talk to each other. However, when the Gaverills had finished collecting the sweets, the Radollans were instructed to collect 2 out of 3 sweets from each Gaverill. After which, the Radollans were shown 2 huge bags of Twisties and were told that they could exchange their sweets for these Twisties which they were allowed to share only amongst the 5 of them.

After the activity, I asked the Gaverills to explain how they felt and I asked how the Radollans felt. The Gaverills who were representative of the villagers were able to explain that they felt that the activity was unfair and they were unhappy while the Radollans expressed that they were happy because they received more than what they asked for without having to do any work, which was representative of the Landlords.

Based on this activity, I distributed a worksheet and asked the class to identify how this system of injustice and exploitation made the villagers in Sing to the Dawn feel.