This project is funded by the Leverhulme trust for a period of two years. The core aim is to explore how children interact with peers from different ethnic groups and how this can influence their social relationships and learning.
Multiracial classrooms provide opportunities for children to learn about other ethnic groups and develop cross-ethnic friendships. Whilst children generally gravitate towards children from the same ethnic group during free play times, in the classroom collaborative learning activities encourage children to work together to solve problems or achieve joint goals. This positive collaboration may well provide a constructive context for improving children’s ethnic understanding, attitudes and increasing cross ethnic friendships.
In this research we aim to examine how children from same and cross ethnic groups play with each other and how they learn with each other. This is an important project that could provide information to help teachers and researchers devise more effective ways of teaching and better collaborative learning opportunities for children.
There are three main components to this study:
The first study: we will split children into either same, or cross-ethnic pairs. We will give children a chance to play together with puppets every day for a week. At the end of the week we will examine whether children have developed friendships and more positive attitude, not only to the child they played with, but also with other children from the same ethnic group as that child.
The second study: we will again split children into either same, or cross-ethnic pairs. We will give children simple and fun Science tasks, for example, examining how far a toy car travels down different inclines. Children will work together every day for a week. Again, at the end of the week we will examine whether children have developed a friendship and more positive attitude, not only to the child they played with, but also with other children from the same group as that child. We will also examine under which conditions children learned the best.
The third study: involves comparison of the ‘play’ and ‘work’ groups to allow us to examine which activities promoted the most positive and lasting relationships between children.