Appreciating Differences
Children are born with or acquire facial differences
due to cancer to catastrophic accidents. The fact that
their faces are different often leaves them vulnerable
to childhood and teenage years characterized by unremitting
teasing and social ostracism.
There is no question that
such teasing can and does impact a child, not often
for the good, emotionally,
socially and academically. Teasing takes place when
people do not understand difference or are frightened
by it. Education allows for the possibility of empathy
and the reduction of fear.
Each year 300,000 children
in the U.S. are born with craniofacial difference – that
means a lot of children entering school each year with
a facial difference – perhaps
entering your school.
Meet a group of courageous and
creative young people, the Inner Faces, who have craniofacial
differences.
Faces: A Portrait is a documentary portraying
their participation in the creation and production
of an
off-Broadway theater piece that is also the story of
their lives.
This documentary, along with an outstanding
guide entitled Appreciating Differences, helps students
look at their
own self-doubts, their own feeling of being imperfect
or blemished. Comparing their feelings to those of
the Inner Faces Players helps show more similarities
in difference than we imagine.
In teaching diversity – that
facial anomalies are just another difference – we
can change the atmosphere from one of teasing and exclusion
to one
of empathy and inclusion.
For your copy of Faces: A Portrait and Appreciating
Differences please contact Forward Face at (212)684-5860,
or info@forwardface.org. |
