A wake up call for all ages, this best-selling program teaches about prejudices using a dramatic framework. It provides an examination of the realities of discrimination as experienced by actual students in the classroom of third grade teacher, Jane Elliott, whose demonstration shows how quickly children can succumb to discriminatory behavior.
This video chronicles her, now famous, exercise where she divides her class based upon the color of their eyes and bestows upon one group privileges and on the other group impediments. Her work endures to this day and this ABC video, decades later, still has a great deal to teach us.
English, Spanish and Sensitive Audience Versions included.
Filmed 15 years after Eye of the Storm, this sequel explores what the children in Jane Elliott's daring classroom exercise learned about discrimination and how it still affects them today. Ms. Elliott meets with some of her former students to analyze the exercise in prejudice and its impact on their lives.
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BLUE-EYED offers viewers a chance to watch a full-length workshop with America's most dynamic diversity trainer, Jane Elliott.
In BLUE-EYED, we join a group of 40 teachers, police, school administrators and social workers in Kansas City - blacks, Hispanics, whites, women and men. The blue-eyed members are subjected to pseudo-scientific explanations of their inferiority, culturally biased IQ tests and blatant discrimination. In just a few hours under Ms. Elliott's withering regime, we watch grown professionals become despondent and distracted, stumbling over the simplest commands.
Clips from her original classes and interviews with former students confirm that Jane Elliott's workshops make them permanently more empathetic and sensitive to the problem of racism. Counselors, student program administrators, corporate trainers and psychologists agree: BLUE-EYED is a film every person needs to experience.
This is a single product and does not qualify for volume discount.
THE ANGRY EYE skillfully interweaves the young adults in the exercise with post-session interviews that show the participants struggling to come to terms with their recent experiences. Through the intense and often painful emotions that the exercise provokes shines a hope that, someday, we will overcome the capricious lines that divide us - if only we can learn to accept and appreciate our differences.
Closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.
This is a janeelliott.com exclusive product which contains both the 35 & 52 minute versions on one DVD.
The 35 minute version includes subtitles.
This is a single product and does not qualify for volume discount.
Jane Elliott's latest - and perhaps most moving - film documenting her universal Blue-Eyes/Brown-Eyes Exercise in discrimination.
America's foremost diversity educator Jane Elliott conducts her world famous Blue-Eyes/ Brown-Eyes Exercise in discrimination in Australia with the Whites and Aborigines. Watch the astonishing and thoughtful results of this exercise.
A must-buy for Jane Elliott admirers.
"I'm Jane Elliott. I'm your resident bitch for the day - welcome to the workshop." Anti-racism expert, Jane Elliott.
That's how anti-racism expert Jane Elliott describes her role in this reality-based documentary that challenges Canadian's attitudes towards Native Canadians. "Even nice Canadians are racist." Whether or not you agree, that's Ms. Elliott's starting point as she welcomes and bullies 22 Canadians who have volunteered to participate in her internationally renowned workshop. With cameras rolling, she divides the unsuspecting participants by eye color, blue-eyes in one group, brown-eyes (many of them Native Canadian) in the other. Elliott turns the tables on the participants treating the blue eyes as "persons of color," confronting and brow-beating them, while the "brown eyes" get treated with respect. Filmed in Regina, Saskatchewan, Indecently Exposed!, illustrates and exposes how systemic racism continues to thrive in Canada today.
If you think it couldn't happen here or it wouldn't happen now, this may prove to be a bit of an Eye Opener!
Jane Elliott, an internationally acclaimed diversity champion, conducts her Blue-eyed, Brown-eyed Exercise in Glasgow, Scotland with thirty-five volunteers from across the United Kingdom.
Many of the blue-eyed participants were shocked at their own reactions to what for many of them was the new experience of being powerless. Many of the brown-eyed participants were shocked at how easy they found it to go along with what was happening even though they knew it was wrong. They all have a better understanding of the systematic nature of racism as well as the awareness of how their actions or inaction can reinforce and perpetuate it.
Eye Opener shows this exercise is as relevant and necessary in the UK today as it was in Riceville, Iowa in 1968.
Winner of the Premier Award
Learning Onscreen Awards 2004
In 1968, in response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a third grade teacher, Ms. Jane Elliott, in all-white, all-Christian, Riceville, Iowa, involved her students in an exercise in discrimination based on eye color. It was her attempt to help them to understand some of the reasons why Black people were taking to the streets and demanding equitable treatment with whites.
Since then she has conducted the same exercise with people of all ages in cities all over the United States and in several other countries.
Over a dozen films have been made of Ms. Elliott conducting the exercise. In response to requests from diversity trainers, both in the US and abroad, Ms. Elliott has now provided us with a compilation DVD of some compelling moments from those films. Seeing and discussing these clips can help us to recognize some of the issues surrounding the "isms" with which we all live. It may also help us to realize how we as human beings react when we are treated unfairly on the basis of physical characteristics over which we have no control. The use of the material can help to increase our awareness of the effects of racism, sexism, ageism, able-ism, homophobia, ethnocentricity, and bigotry in general.
This DVD contains carefully selected and thought-provoking clips from the Blue-Eyed/Brown-Eyed documentaries. These compelling moments are to be used to help diversity educators to respond to statements most frequently expressed by participants during diversity workshops.
The accompanying study guide contains ten examples of the stereotypical remarks that are made in Diversity Training classes. It lists clips relative to the remarks from several of the films, and provides discussion questions that help to refute some of the erroneous assumptions implied in the remarks. This material is appropriate for diversity training in junior and senior high schools, colleges, corporations, military groups and civic organizations.
Additional study guides are also available.
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Jane Elliott, internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health
Association Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class
system based upon purely arbitrary factors. And if you think this does not apply to you. . . you are in for a rude awakening.
In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. over thirty years ago, Jane Elliott devised the
controversial and startling, "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise. This, now famous, exercise labels participants as inferior
or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority. Everyone
who is exposed to Jane Elliott's work, be it through a lecture, workshop, or video, is dramatically affected by it.
"It won't help much to be prepared to face Jane Elliott. This elderly woman will tear down any shield. Even we, the spectators in BLUE EYED, can't get rid of this feeling of uneasiness, embarrassment, anxiety and utterly helpless hatred when she starts keeping people down, humiliating them, deriding them, incapacitating them. No doubt about this: for three quarters of the time in this documentation Jane Elliott is the meanest, the lowest, the most detestful, the most hypocritical human being hell has ever spit back on earth. But she should be an example for all of us". - Stuttgarter Zeitung