skip to main content


Title: Promoting Fair and Just School Environments: Developing Inclusive Youth

Incidents of prejudice and discrimination in K–12 schools have increased over the past decade around the world, including the United States. In 2018, more than two-thirds of the 2,776 U.S. educators surveyed reported witnessing a hate or bias incident in their school. Children and adolescents who experience prejudice, social exclusion, and discrimination are subject to compromised well-being and low academic achievement. Few educators feel prepared to incorporate this topic into the education curriculum. Given the long-term harm related to experiencing social exclusion and discrimination, school districts need to create positive school environments and directly address prejudice and bias. Several factors are currently undermining progress in this area. First, national debates in the United States and other countries have politicized the topic of creating fair and just school environments. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted children's and adolescents’ education by halting academic progress which has particularly negatively affected students from marginalized and ethnic/racial minority backgrounds. Third, teachers have experienced significant stress during COVID-19 with an increase in anxiety around virtual instruction and communication with parents. Three strategies recommended to address these converging problems include creating inclusive and nondiscriminatory policies for schools, promoting opportunities for intergroup contact and mutual respect, and implementing evidence-based, developmentally appropriate education programs. It is anticipated that these strategies will help to reduce prejudice, increase ethnic and racial identity (ERI), and promote equity, fairness, and justice in school environments.

 
more » « less
Award ID(s):
1728918
NSF-PAR ID:
10364148
Author(s) / Creator(s):
 ;  
Publisher / Repository:
SAGE Publications
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Volume:
9
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2372-7322
Page Range / eLocation ID:
p. 81-89
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    In June 2020, at the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), which was held entirely online due to the impacts of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), engineering education researchers and social justice scholars diagnosed the spread of two diseases in the United States: COVID-19 and racism. During a virtual workshop (T614A) titled, “Using Power, Privilege, and Intersectionality as Lenses to Understand our Experiences and Begin to Disrupt and Dismantle Oppressive Structures Within Academia,” Drs. Nadia Kellam, Vanessa Svihla, Donna Riley, Alice Pawley, Kelly Cross, Susannah Davis, and Jay Pembridge presented what we might call a pathological analysis of institutionalized racism and various other “isms.” In order to address the intersecting impacts of this double pandemic, they prescribed counter practices and protocols of anti-racism, and strategies against other oppressive “isms” in academia. At the beginning of the virtual workshop, the presenters were pleasantly surprised to see that they had around a hundred attendees. Did the online format of the ASEE conference afford broader exposure of the workshop? Did recent uprising of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the country, and internationally, generate broader interest in their topic? Whatever the case, at a time when an in-person conference could not be convened without compromising public health safety, ASEE’s virtual conference platform, furnished by Pathable and supplemented by Zoom, made possible the broader social impacts of Dr. Svihla’s land acknowledgement of the unceded Indigenous lands from which she was presenting. Svihla attempted to go beyond a hollow gesture by including a hyperlink in her slides to a COVID-19 relief fund for the Navajo Nation, and encouraged attendees to make a donation as they copied and pasted the link in the Zoom Chat. Dr. Cross’s statement that you are either a racist or an anti-racist at this point also promised broader social impacts in the context of the virtual workshop. You could feel the intensity of the BLM social movements and the broader political climate in the tone of the presenters’ voices. The mobilizing masses on the streets resonated with a cutting-edge of social justice research and education at the ASEE virtual conference. COVID-19 has both exacerbated and made more obvious the unevenness and inequities in our educational practices, processes, and infrastructures. This paper is an extension of a broader collaborative research project that accounts for how an exceptional group of engineering educators have taken this opportunity to socially broaden their curricula to include not just public health matters, but also contemporary political and social movements. Engineering educators for change and advocates for social justice quickly recognized the affordances of diverse forms of digital technologies, and the possibilities of broadening their impact through educational practices and infrastructures of inclusion, openness, and accessibility. They are makers of what Gary Downy calls “scalable scholarship”—projects in support of marginalized epistemologies that can be scaled up from ideation to practice in ways that unsettle and displace the dominant epistemological paradigm of engineering education.[1] This paper is a work in progress. It marks the beginning of a much lengthier project that documents the key positionality of engineering educators for change, and how they are socially situated in places where they can connect social movements with industrial transitions, and participate in the production of “undone sciences” that address “a structured absence that emerges from relations of inequality.”[2] In this paper, we offer a brief glimpse into ethnographic data we collected virtually through interviews, participant observation, and digital archiving from March 2019 to August 2019, during the initial impacts of COVID-19 in the United States. The collaborative research that undergirds this paper is ongoing, and what is presented here is a rough and early articulation of ideas and research findings that have begun to emerge through our engagement with engineering educators for change. This paper begins by introducing an image concept that will guide our analysis of how, in this historical moment, forms of social and racial justice are finding their way into the practices of engineering educators through slight changes in pedagogical techniques in response the debilitating impacts of the pandemic. Conceptually, we are interested in how small and subtle changes in learning conditions can socially broaden the impact of engineering educators for change. After introducing the image concept that guides this work, we will briefly discuss methodology and offer background information about the project. Next, we discuss literature that revolves around the question, what is engineering education for? Finally, we introduce the notion of situating engineering education and give readers a brief glimpse into our ethnographic data. The conclusion will indicate future directions for writing, research, and intervention. 
    more » « less
  2. Around the globe, individuals are affected by exclusion, discrimination, and prejudice targeting individuals from racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds as well as crimes based on gender, nationality, and culture (United Nations General Assembly, 2016). Unfortunately, children are often the targeted victims (Costello & Dillard, 2019). What is not widely understood is that the intergroup biases underlying systemic racism start long before adulthood with children displaying notable signs of intergroup bias, sometimes before entering grade school. Intergroup bias refers to the tendency to evaluate members of one’s own group more favorably than someone not identified with one’s group and is typically associated with prejudicial attitudes. Children are both the victims and the perpetrators of bias. In this review, we provide evidence of how biases emerge in childhood, along with an analysis of the significant role of intergroup friendships on enhancing children’s well-being and reducing prejudice in childhood. The review focuses predominantly on the context of race, with the inclusion of several other categories, such as nationality and religion. Fostering positive cross-group friendships in childhood helps to address the negative long-term consequences of racism, discrimination, and prejudice that emerges in childhood and continues through to adulthood.

     
    more » « less
  3. Historic racial disparities in the United States have created an urgent need for evidence‐based strategies promoting African American students’ academic performance via school‐based ethnic‐racial socialization and identity development. However, the temporal order among socialization, identity, and academic performance remains unclear in extant literature. This longitudinal study examined whether school cultural socialization predicted 961 African American adolescents’ grade point averages through their ethnic‐racial identities (49.6% males;Mage = 13.60; 91.9% qualified for free lunch). Results revealed that youth who perceived more school cultural socialization had better grades 1 and 2 years later. In addition, identity commitment (but not exploration) fully mediated these relations. Implications for how educators can help adolescents of color succeed in schools are discussed.

     
    more » « less
  4. Abstract

    Parents and friends are important influences on adolescents’ academic outcomes. We examine whether and how adolescents’ social networks compensate for or enhance the effects of their parents’ education on academic outcomes. Among a large ethnoracially diverse sample of high school students in the Southwestern (N = 2,136) and Midwestern (N = 1,055) United States, results from network autocorrelation models showed that higher levels of mother and father education were related to greater academic self‐efficacy and engagement and higher aspirations, expectations, and grade point averages at both schools. Friends’ parents’ education levels were positively associated with adolescents’ academic aspirations, expectations, and grade point averages across all of the models; higher levels of friends’ parents’ education were related to greater academic self‐efficacy across all models, except for mothers in the Southwest; and friends’ fathers’ education levels were positively related to adolescents’ academic engagement for students in the Midwestern school only. There were no significant interaction effects between parents’ and friends’ parents’ education levels in predicting academic outcomes. Differences in the distribution of parental education across ethnic‐racial groups shaped the implications of the model for adolescents’ academic adjustment. Findings highlight the impact of educational opportunity across generations in shaping academic inequities.

     
    more » « less
  5. Abstract

    Youth in the United States receive countless messages about the meanings and consequences of racial group membership. The processes through which these racialized messages are transmitted, known collectively as ethnic‐racial socialization, are known to influence youths’ psychosocial and academic development—especially their ethnic‐racial identity. However, most studies have focused exclusively on parents’ roles in the ethnic‐racial socialization process. In the present study, drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 64 Black adolescents, we examined youths’ descriptions of their experiences with (and understandings of) race to provide an “up‐close” view of the sources and processes involved in ethnic‐racial socialization. In addition to providing further evidence of the roles of parents and school curricula in shaping youths’ racial beliefs, results suggested that ethnic‐racial socialization messages frequently emerged from youths’ direct and vicarious exposure to racial discrimination and inequality in the schools they attended, the public places they visited, and in the media they consumed.

     
    more » « less