Vocabulary of Feelings
Inviting students to learn and use the language of feelings may help them accept/acknowledge that they have different responses to social issues. Below is a EMOTIONS-FEELINGS chart that may be useful in your lesson planning.
Consider starting by having students use the chart to find more precise words to describe the feelings/emotions of characters/people they read about in literature, articles, and history.
For example, “What are three adjectives that could describe the way CHARACTER/PERSON X feels about what happened in this scene?” Avoid person to person until students have more experience with the terms. Yes, they’ll be thinking “people”, but keep the initial exercises more neutral in ways that have students looking at what happened rather than who did it.
Note the chart uses colors. Consider having students use colors to symbolize a scene in their reading or an incident in the news. The goal is to help students expand their vocabularies as they acknowledge and discuss incidents that create different emotional responses.
Your students may notice that the emotions on the other side of the wheel can help neutralize opposite those opposite them. Hmmm. Could lead to interesting conversations as you explore issues of social justice in literature, life and lessons students are learning in other courses.