“Social Reasoning about Exclusion”: A report from Dr. Melanie Killen (EDHD)

I traveled to Zurich, Switzerland to give a talk entitled: “Social Reasoning about Exclusion” on May 27th at the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich. The mission of the Center is to contribute to the welfare and “social productivity” of young people by promoting their personal development and employability, their respect for and integration with nature and culture, and “their ability to meet the challenges of emerging trends such as new technologies.”  The Jacobs Foundation is a private charitable trust, established in 1988 in Zurich by Klaus J. Jacobs, and supports collaborative international projects at the University of Zurich.

I am collaborating with Dr. Tina Malti on a project on peer exclusion in the Zurich schools. Exclusion based on ethnicity and culture membership is a very pressing issue in Europe, as it is in the U.S. and other places in the world. Surprisingly, little empirical research has been conducted on children’s attitudes about exclusion and evaluations of exclusionary behavior.  This is partly due to the dominant emphasis on individual differences regarding peer rejection based on personality traits (being shy or aggressive) rather than on the basis of cultural membership (being Arab or Latino).  Moreover, the need for research is due to the very recent increased mobility around the world which has created areas of inclusion/exclusion in cultures with new immigration patterns (e.g., Serbians in Switzerland, Pakistanis in London).  This raises a host of issues for educators regarding how to confront tensions rising from negative intergroup attitudes in classroom and school settings.

Our project is about a pressing issue in Zurich which has to do with peer exclusion of Serbian children in Swiss-German schools. There are also tension between Swiss-German and German children regarding inclusion and exclusion.  We will be interviewing children as part of a longitudinal study on children’s friendship and morality but finding out how children evaluate a range of everyday exclusion contexts. When do they view exclusion as legitimate and why, and how does this change with age?  When do children view exclusion as unfair? What are the variables and sources of influence that contribute to viewing exclusion as legitimate or unfair? Understanding their judgments about exclusion provides a window into areas of conflict as well as basic research on development which can be used for intervention projects and curricula innovations.

After my formal talk, I gave a 2 hour workshop for the graduate students at the Center to provide them with details about our research project in terms of the theoretical framework and methodology.  This informal talk has been instituted at the Jacobs Center to provide graduate students with an informal context to ask questions of Visiting Scholars. The workshop was a lively exchange about how exclusion is measured and studied, how researchers in the field define concepts such as morality and prejudice, and how coding systems are established for categorizing children’s reasoning and evaluations of exclusion acts by children in school contexts.

Following the trip to Zurich, I went to the University of Kent at Canterbury where I worked with two colleagues, Prof. Adam Rutland, and Prof. Dominic Abrams, on issues of exclusion. We are integrating our theories of social reasoning and subjective group dynamics for investigating the issue of exclusion among children in school contexts.  We have developed a protocol for analyzing how children and adolescents evaluate group norms and what they understand that group norms may differ from their beliefs about equality and fairness.

Our new integrative methodology for investigating children’s and adolescents’ understanding of group dynamics and exclusion will be administered for a project this fall in Montgomery County Public Schools. The day after I returned to the U.S., I found out that our project will be funded by the National Science Foundation.  Thank you for supporting this trip with the COE International Travel Award.

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jdgg@umd.edu

 

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