Challenging children’s attitudes towards ethnic out-groups in mainly white schools: What works and why?

When?

Monday 10 March 2008, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

Room 19AD04 AD Building, University of Surrey, Department of Psychology

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Dr Lindsey Cameron

Dr Lindsey Cameron, University of Kent

In recent years, the need to tackle children’s attitudes towards members of other ethnic groups has become a ‘hot topic’ in education.  Schools are required to maintain good race relations amongst pupils by, for instance, removing divisions between groups of pupils or minimising racist incidents.  However, challenging racist attitudes, and promoting diversity, may be more difficult in ‘mainly white’ schools, and sometimes teachers are reluctant to raise these issues in the classroom.  In this presentation I will outline why it is important to promote positive attitudes towards people who belong to other ethnic groups in ‘mainly white’ schools, and will present the findings of a series of studies in which two prejudice-reduction techniques, derived from social and developmental psychology, were evaluated.  These techniques were ‘extended contact’ story-reading and ‘multiple classification skills training’.  The implications of these findings for anti-racism interventions in the classroom will be discussed.