Battle Royal by Ralph Ellison

Sample Solution

The theme of race and identity is prevalent in both Battle Royal by Ralph Ellison and Notes of A Native Son by James Baldwin. In Battle Royal, the protagonist’s struggle with being a black man in a white-dominated society is highlighted through his interactions with other characters, including his grandfather’s advice to “live with your head in the lion’s mouth.” This serves as a metaphor for how he must deal with the racism he faces daily, and it also symbolizes his own internal struggle to find his place in society. Similarly, Notes of A Native Son centers around Baldwin's reflections on growing up as an African American male in America during the period of Jim Crow laws  

Joint pretend play is a very early context in which children learn how to put aside empirical thinking and accept the given premises through analytical thinking. Analytic thinking is a type of critical thinking, in which a person articulates, conceptualizes or solves problems by making decisions that are sensible given the available premises (Ref). In joint pretend play, children accept the initiator’s instruction and enter an imaginative world which do not necessarily contain any empirical reality. Nevertheless, they adopt such a given worldview to imagine themselves in that same situation and act vis-a-vis that imaginary situation. This serves a stepstone for children’s school learning because school imparts knowledge in a formal analytical structure, and teachers teach knowledge that is beyond children’s empirical understanding (Harris, 2000). Gradually, children perceive teachers as taking up the didactic role while they themselves as adopting the student role.

Perspective Taking

Perspective-taking is defined as the process by which an individual views a situation from another’s point-of-view. Burns and Brainerd (1979) examined if constructive and dramatic plays bring improvements on perspective taking for preschool children. 51 children with the average age of 4 years and 10 months who were attending day care center were divided into three groups: the constructive play experimental group, the dramatic play experimental group, and the control group respectively. The constructive group had 10 play sessions, which were to build certain objects with materials provided in small groups. The first session’s project was suggested by the experimenter, but the consecutive sessions’ projects were decided by the children. For the dramatic play group, the children were to choose a character after the experimenter explained the theme of the play of each session. The control group did not have any activities other than pretest and posttest which were administered at the same time as the experimental groups. Pretest consisted of three different types of perspective tasks: one perceptual task, two cognitive tasks, and two affective tasks. For perceptual task, the children were told to turn a tray with some characters on it to the way how the experimenter is seeing it. For cognitive task, some objects such as flower, tie, socks, doll, and purse were spreaded on a table and the children were asked to pick an appropriate birthday present for mom, dad, teacher, and friend. During the affective tas