Late last night, students were working on setting up their installations for the annual MLK exhibit. The exhibit is a part of an IAP course, Martin Luther King, Jr. Design Seminar (17.922). This year’s exhibits address topics such as police brutality and lack of diversity at the Academy Awards. Photo: Lenny Martinez, The Tech, 2 Feb 2016

Perspectives on Diversity: Teaching Tolerance by Example

By Eun J. Lee, The Tech, 3 Feb 2004

A black male walks up to a restaurant counter and asks for a cup of coffee. The white waitress behind the counter snubs him and attends to the white female who comes in after him.

The waitress and customer are just 7th graders, and the counter is just a desk in Gretchen Brion Meisels’ language arts class at Fletchard Maynard Academy, only a stone’s throw away from MIT’s campus. On this day, her students are participating in discussions of race and diversity with MIT students as part of a class project in the Martin Luther King Jr. Design seminar (17.920).

“It’s always important to make time for conversations about race and diversity,” Brion Meisels says. “It’s easy for teachers to lose track of this dialogue.”

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