Students walking across campus Monday and Tuesday afternoon might see something a little unusual on the Boulevard.
That’s what Ali Martin Scoufield and the rest of the Diversity Action Team are going for.
The group has been working to put on the Tunnel of Oppression program to educate people about different kinds of discrimination.
“The idea is for it to be an experiential journey towards awareness – I know it sounds cheesy, but that’s what it really is,” said Martin Scoufield.
The program will be on the Boulevard Monday and Tuesday from 5 until 8 p.m.
It involves students walking through four skits dealing with different forms of oppression.
Issues will include body image, social status, ethnicity and sexual orientation, said Martin Scoufield.
The skits are written and acted by students, and the entirety of the program “shouldn’t last longer than 40 minutes,” said Martin Scoufield.
She added that students would have a kind of tour guide who would lead them through the experiences, and at the end there will be a debriefing staff from the counseling center.
“It’s meant to be unsettling,” she said. “It really helps bring awareness to how we treat other people and how we marginalize them based on really insignificant things.”
The DAT, which is chaired by Martin Scoufield, has student and staff members from Residence Life and Student Housing and the Department of Multicultural Student Affairs.
Fernando Salazar, the coordinator of Hispanic Student Services, is also on the DAT.
Salazar said he’s excited about the location of the tunnel this year.
“The Boulevard worked out best because it’s centralized, and that’s what we want – curiosity,” he said. DAT put the Tunnel of Oppression program on last semester, but it was in the SMU Service House.
Salazar explained that the location worked well, but the program wasn’t as visible as it could have been. He added that the issues the Tunnel deals with exist everywhere. “It’s going to be shocking,” he said. “We’d like to say this doesn’t happen at SMU, but it does.”
Salazar and Martin Scoufield both hope that the innovative presentation of the issues will get the point across better than more traditional methods.
“This is a good way, a fun way of having discourse,” said Salazar. “It’s an interactive way to get them thinking about the issues,” he added.
Martin Scoufield said the program is a necessary one – even for people who think they may not need it.
“People think ‘I treat everyone as they should be treated’ … but everybody can learn from this, whether they’re the most enlightened or the most closed minded [person],” she said.
