Utopia Project: Eliminating Bullying in Elementary Schools

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The relationship of teachers and students are a vital yet sensitive element because teachers play a big role in educating the students of intercultural awareness. If the teachers are portraying one group of students in a negative way so will the rest of the students. A study done by Van den Bergh et al. (2010) focused on the effects of teacher’s prejudice attitudes in relation to their expectation and academic achievement of their students. Participants included 41 Dutch origin teachers and 7 to 12 years of age Dutch, Turkish or Moroccan origin-students. A Modern Racism Scale measured explicit prejudiced attitudes and implicit prejudiced attitudes were measure by IAT. A six-item scale measured teachers’ expectation in regards to each student. The recent standard text comprehension and mathematics test scores measured the academic achievement of the students. The results indicated that negative prejudice attitude toward the minority ethnic group, Turkish and Moroccan students, was shown in every classroom and the teacher predisposed of the student being unintelligent and not successful in their school careers creating a achievement gap between the Dutch students and Turkish/Moroccan students[j]. This study showed the importance of the role teachers have and their communication with the student. In order for such effects to occur the communication of negative prejudice attitude must have happened between the teacher and the student[k][l].

Another research study indicated that, “perceived prejudice is a social psychological phenomenon --- it connects the self to others in ways that are often quite subjective and open to interpretation --- recognizing that perceptions of prejudice at school can be individualized or generalized suggests the need to also explore the ways that school-level and individual-level perceptions reinforce, magnify, and influence each other” (Benner, Crosnoe and Eccles, 2015). The same study also stated that with negative climate of the school results into poor academic performance for the students. Moreover, peer prejudice also marks the students being vulnerable to social stigma.

Another interesting research article by Berger et al. (2016), the authors investigated on the efficacy of Extended Class Exchange Program in decreasing prejudice attitudes in the context of Israeli and Palestinian conflict. A total of 322 Israeli- Jewish and Israeli- Palestinian were assigned randomly to either control or intervention classes. Students who were put into intervention classes were involved with ECEP’s activities and students who were put into control classes were involved in social and emotional learning program. Some of the activities ECEP provided can include, but not limited to,: “getting to know each other” in which the students focus on the similarities and differences of each other thus establishing a cohesion, “me and my peers” in which students learn how they form opinions, stereotypes and prejudices about other students, and “me and my family in which the students explore a variety of cultures and tradition and they develop respect for the differences of the cultures. The ECEP also provided additional tasks in which the students develop empathy and compassion for self and others. Some of the activities include, but not limited to, students expressing their feeling and learning how to verbalize them, students recognizing other students feeling and acknowledge them and lastly, students learn how to control their anger and avoid overreacting. The results indicated that students who were exposed to Extended Class Exchange Program decreased their negative and stereotypic views towards other ethnic groups. The program was able to make changes in all aspects of prejudice, which is affective, cognitive and behavioral. [m]

In sum, stereotypes and prejudice transition the student to negative behavior, which that creates an unsafe climate of fear among the student. [n]

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Reference(s)

Aronson, E. (2012). The social animal (11th ed.) New York, NY: Worth Publishers.

Benner, A. D., Crosnoe, R., & Eccles, J. S. (2015). Schools, Peers, and Prejudice in Adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence : The Official Journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence, 25(1), 173–188. http://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12106

Berger, R., Benatov, J., Abu-Raiya, H., & Tadmor, C. T. (2016). Reducing prejudice and promoting positive intergroup attitudes among elementary-school children in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Journal of School Psychology.[o]

Intercultural Materials and Activities for Elementary School Children. (1947). The High School Journal, 30(4), 188-190. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40362675

Jan, A., & Husain, S. (2015). Bullying in Elementary Schools: Its Causes and Effects on Students. Journal of Education and Practice, 6(19), 43-56.

Van den Bergh, L., Denessen, E., Hornstra, L., Voeten, M., & Holland, R. (2010). The Implicit Prejudiced Attitudes of Teachers: Relations to Teacher Expectations and the Ethnic Achievement Gap. American Educational Research Journal, 47(2), 497-527. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40645448