Considering I had never come across Contact Hypothesis and Social Identity Theory before, I have learnt a lot from this article! When I have a bit more time and headspace, I will definitely finish reading it…

Contact hypothesis

It proposes that if people can come together in a positively structured environment and get to know each other, they can overcome negative stereotypes and thus resolve conflicts.

Criticism:

• If the environment of interaction is negatively structured, it can have harmful repercussions.
• It discounts the influence of participant’s social identities, especially when they are not in the positively structured environment.

Social Identity Theory (SIT)

It proposes that people’s social identities are determinant factors in how they interact with each other. Therefore, to achieve transformation in encounters, focus is required on the local-cultural characteristics of participants.

Criticism:

• It discounts the fact that people simultaneously belong to different social groups and therefore have a combination of different social identities.
• It discounts the influence of participant’s individual perspectives.

Intersectionality

As it ‘posits that oppression in one place is intricately linked to oppression everywhere else’ (Hahn Tapper, 2013, p.421), it is a usual tool to amend some of the issues with SIT. Because people belong to several social groups, their identities comprise aspects of the groups’ identities. Therefore no one is just a victim or just a perpetrator; ‘all groups, to various degrees, are victims and perpetrators, innocent and guilty’ (Hahn Tapper, 2013, p.422).

If I had stopped reading on page 417, my provocation would be that SIT is equally limiting, and that an ‘myopic, orthodox’ based approach to SIT is arguably just as ineffective/harmful as contact thesis can be. But the author hit the nail in the head when he stated that

‘each of us has several social identities—identities based in relation to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, and so on. In addition, each of us has an individual identity—a unique personality shaped in relation to our manifold social identities’ (Hahn Tapper, 2013, p.422).

Diagram

This diagram is what I aspire my teaching to be moving forwards:

1. actively avoiding the banking education model. We learn from each other’s experiences in a ‘horizontal’ relationship between tutor and students.
2. Understand how individual and social identities influence our interactions and use this understanding for transformation.
3. Acknowledge that we all participate in unbalanced dynamics of power.
4. Use different methodologies that enable experiential education, including conventional classroom lectures and book studies, as well as field trips, peer-to-peer projects, co-creation, guest speakers, play, etc.
5. Responsibility and empowerment. Admittedly, I haven’t reached this section of the text, but I presume to empower students by enabling them to identify their responsibilities and roles in society.