The Sociology of Halloween

This Power Point is a bit of fun and a break from our everyday curriculum.

This resource can be used with lower year groups as a marketing tool, or as part of Sociology club, or with GCSE year 9 groups.

The slides aim to encourage students to think about the representation of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and the body in relation to Halloween. Additionally, there are a few slides which prompt students to focus on the agencies of socialisation and their role in teaching norms and values surrounding Halloween.

The Power Point is not designed to be taught in one lesson. Instead, you can pick and select the specific areas you would like to teach and deliver (this includes gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity or body and mental health). Due to this, the lesson objectives are quite vague and generic. You may wish to change these to suit your requirements. There are tasks embedded within the slides with supporting notes.

There are progress check slides and visual and discussion based activities. Content and activities are summarised below:

Agencies of Socialisation: Discussion concerning the 'deviant' norms and values encouraged within AOS during Halloween. Interactive notebook activity. See Word Doc.
Gender activity: Silly to 'sexy'. Female identity and the Halloween costumes. Students create age appropriate costumes aimed at an 8 year old.
Sexuality: Discussion based on 'heteronormativity'.
Race and ethnicity: Discussion based on racist Halloween costumes. Followed by a literacy based activity where students write a letter of complaint to a Costume Company.
Body and mental health: Students focus on a contemporary debate and create a promotional campaign.

There are many more topics we can explore as Sociologists, but this resource is a nice little starting point, encouraging higher thinking skills and the development of sociological awareness. AO2 skills are tested throughout.

Have fun with it.