There are many playing card activities to deal with inclusion, diversity and social cliques. Pokerface is one of them, and it is especially useful in school settings infamous for exclusivity. It can take 10-30 minutes, depending on debrief and student and teacher engagement.
Basic Information:
- Grade Level: 6-12
- Subject: Environmental Science, Social Studies, History, English; all other subjects as well.
- Number of Participants: 10 or more people
- Relationship to Environmental Education: Opportunity to discuss how humans place value on other people, other species and our land.
Materials:
- 1 deck of playing cards (preferably a jumbo-sized deck)
Instructions:
- Give each participant a card, ask them not to look at it and put the card to their forehead with the value facing outwards.
- Ask participants to treat each other based on the face value of their card. Do not give any more direction than that.
- Jokers can be used as wild cards. Other participants can treat them as they wish.
- As a facilitator, watch how the participants group one another, and make notes for a later discussion.
- Finish the game once you see everyone has generally grouped themselves as they see fit.
Debrief:
It’s amazing to watch the royalty cards get bowed to and the 2 cards get pushed away and treated poorly. Sometimes the 2 cards will form their own ‘gang’ because they are tired of being treated poorly. Sometimes participants who realize they have a royalty card may apologize and feel bad for excluding lower-numbered cards. Sometimes the Joker will be considered a royalty card and other times, participants will not know how to treat them and in turn shun them.
This games should lead into an excellent discussion on who places value on you and how we internalize other people’s judgments of us. What happens when people feel left out. Isn’t the two card sometimes the most valuable card when playing blackjack and you have a 19? Things like that. This game is also great to discuss diversity and people of all abilities can play. Near the end of the discussion, the facilitator should direct the conversation on how the participants may experience this play out in high school and how that may make learning positive or negative.
Critical Reflection:
I was first introduced to this game in my “Curriculum and Instruction in History” class. It had nothing to do with curriculum content “directly” but everything to do with being a student and, in general, a human. I thought it was an excellent back pocket game that I could use when an issue of bullying, clique-y-ness or even histories of exclusion arise in our class. As a history educator, I could alter the debrief and relate it to the treatment of Jewish Canadians or German-Canadian Mennonites during WWII, indigenous peoples during the Kanesatake Resistance, or of suffragist women in the 1920s. Unfortunately, issues of exclusion and fear of diversity travel across time and space, but fortunately that means that this game is transferable to all situations. As an ecological educator, I could even adapt the debrief discussion and introduce how we place value on land, humans, animals, and plants. How do we choose which land to alter? Why? Who and what do we value more? The possibilities of this game are endless and as one who has played it, I realize how easily one becomes invested in playing the game, even if it is 5 minutes.
An Educator's Toolkit 