This educator conducted the 'Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes' field experiment in her class:
-She first conducted the experiment the day following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination - 5th April 1968.
-Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in her classroom. Referring to Martin Luther King Jr., he asked, "Why'd they shoot that King?".
-After the rest of the class arrived, she asked them how they thought it feels to be a Black boy or girl.
-She suggested to the class it would be hard for them to understand discrimination without experiencing it themselves and then asked the children if they would like to find out - they said in a chorus, "yeah".
-She decided to base the exercise on eye colour rather than skin colour to show the children what racial segregation would be like.
-At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that brown-eyed children were better than blue-eyed children.
-To counter this, she lied to the children by stating melanin was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability.
-Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away.
-Those who were deemed 'superior' became arrogant, bossy, and otherwise unpleasant to their "inferior" classmates. Their grades on simple tests were better, and they completed mathematical and reading tasks that had seemed outside their ability before.
-The 'inferior' classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children who scored more poorly on tests, and even during recess isolated themselves, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children's academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
-The next Monday, she reversed the exercise, making the blue-eyed children superior.
-While the blue-eyed children did taunt the brown-eyed children in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, she reported it was much less intense.
-To reflect on the experience, she asked the children to write down what they had learned.