Cem Berkay Eminoğlu’s reflection and experiences:

When pedagogic in-class materials are considered, representation has always been a problem. Especially for students of minority groups, the issue pertains even more seriously. Education is just another space where their ethnocultural identity is overlooked. But just because they are under-represented, it does not mean that they disappear. What I wanted to achieve, critically, in this lesson plan, was to bring forth the minority groups through child figures/characters and represent them in educational materials to 1) make students aware of other minority ethnocultural groups with whom they share the same geography, and 2) to make students, if any, who are a part of one of the target minority groups feel more welcomed and safer. The English unit “Festivals” was the perfect opportunity to meet this end as minority ethnocultural groups and their various festivals and festival activities provided me with more than enough material to work with. Why I felt uncomfortable about while preparing the materials was because I risked stereotyping these groups to make them more “recognizable.” Also, there is always the issue of who representing whom; as a person who belongs to none of these groups my representation can easily be seen as misleading, so in order not to under-represent, I think also risked misrepresentation. Despite, all, I think, my attempt can still be regarded as a counter-act to represent the diverse ethno-sociocultural landscape of this geography against the deliberate misrecognition and erasure of such identities that some of the students would have probably been unaware of. Despite such worries, I am glad that I brought the issue up and provided students a space to engage with them critically.

Download the Lesson Plan Here:

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