Kindness in Kindergarten

Like many students at Holy Cross, I participate in SPUD (Student Programs for Urban Development). On Thursday mornings, I enter into Ms. Collin's* classroom at Quinsigamond Elementary School, where I stay for an hour and attempt to keep twenty-five kindergarteners cheerful and focused. This is my second year spending time in this classroom and therefore my second class of students. While Quinsig is probably less than a mile away from my home on Easy Street, it can often feel like a whole different world. The student population is very diverse, with 13% of students being African American, 8% Asian, 39% Hispanic, 35% White and 5% Multi-Race. One morning, I was sitting at the "blue table" practicing writing the letter "t" on dry erase boards when a well-dressed blonde girl told me her daddy worked at Holy Cross, an African American girl told me my skin was very white and pointed out my freckles, and a boy tried to talk to me in Albanian, the only language he can speak. My classmates growing up were never as ethnically diverse as the students I have seen in the last two years at Quinsig. However, unlike in my own classrooms growing up, I notice little to no displays of prejudice or racism among the children. I have been lead to wonder whether it is the young age of these students or the nature of the classroom dynamic that makes this possible.

In our class readings and discussions of prejudice, we have explored the importance of in-group vs. out-group. This concept points to the fact that humans naturally categorize both people and things into groups that make sense to them. This categorization, however, often leads to in-group bias, the tendency to treat members of one’s own group more positively than members of the out-group. Another result of social categorization is out-group homogeneity, thinking that members of the out-group are all alike. This in-group can be observed at different levels and in regards to different things. For example at Quinsig, in-group could be based on skin color, the table kids sit at (blue table vs. kids that sit at the yellow, red and green tables) or the class they are in (Ms. Collin's vs. the other kindergarten classes at the school).

A study by Heidi McGlothlin and Melanie Killen was able to shed some light on how Ms. Collin's diverse classroom might relate to racism and prejudice in children. The study entitled “How social experience is related to children’s intergroup attitudes” examined the display of racial bias and evaluations of cross race friendship in ethnically heterogeneous and ethnically homogeneous schools. The method was to test European American children from both homogeneous and heterogeneous schools and African Americans from heterogeneous schools using the Ambiguous Situations Task. The children were 7 and 10 years old. The answers to questions asked during testing displayed their interpretations of ambiguous situations involving both races as well as evaluations of potential for cross race friendships. Results found that European American children from homogeneous schools were more likely to demonstrate in-group racial bias when evaluating peer situations, and were less likely to judge that black and white children could be friends after a conflict than both the African and European American children attending heterogeneous schools. Over two-thirds of children from the diverse school environment were optimistic about the white and black characters in the scenarios becoming friends, while only half of the European American children from homogeneous schools thought friendship was possible. Another significant finding was that European American children at homogeneous schools interpreted the behavior of in-group members more positively, not the behavior or out-group members more negatively. 

Applying these results to the observations I have made through my volunteer work with SPUD, I can infer that it is not only the young age of the students I work with that affects their attitudes toward one another, but also the diverse makeup of their classroom. Their ethnic diversity sets up a situation in which the in-group of their class is heterogeneous. There is motivation to treat members of the in-group positively. Since the findings showed in-group bias to be distinct from out-group negativity, it would be true here that children in Ms. Collin's class have positive attitudes toward a larger spectrum of students than a child in a homogenous classroom would. Instead of growing up in an all-white classroom and developing positive associations toward white people exclusively, they grow up in a classroom with people of many different backgrounds and develop positive intergroup relations with all of them. 

Posted by Emily Martin
*(Teacher's name has been changed)

Reference

McGlothlin, H., & Killen, M. (2010). How social experience is related to children's intergroup attitudes. European Journal Of Social Psychology, 40(4), 625-634.