13.1 Appendix b: deciding for yourself about the research  (Page 16/20)

To test these possibilities, Donna Perkins and Carolyn Mebert interviewed 79 children at six preschool and after-school child care centers (2005). Some of the centers emphasized multicultural education, some emphasized multicultural education as well as an emergent curriculum, and some emphasized neither. Perkins and Mebert assessed children’s knowledge and attitudes about race in several ways. For example, they displayed pictures of other children over various races on a felt board, and asked the participating children to arrange the pictures so that children were closer together if more similar and farther apart if more different. They also asked participating children to evaluate simple stories or anecdotes about three pictures, one of a white child, one of an African-American child, and one of an Asian-American child. In one of the anecdotes, for example, the researcher asked, “Some children are naughty because they draw with crayons on the walls. Which of these children (in the pictures) might do that?” The participating child could then choose any or all of the pictured children—or choose none at all.

What did Perkins and Mebert find from this study? Four ideas stood out especially clearly:

1. Children indeed showed more “expertise” about race if they attended a child care center that emphasized multicultural education—but only if they center also emphasized emergent curriculum. To be effective, in other words, information about human diversity had to grow out of children’s personal concerns and interests. It was not enough simply to tell them about human diversity.
2. Although a multicultural/emergent program was effective in sensitizing children to differences between races, it was not especially effective for sensitizing them to differences within races. When it came to differences among African-Americans, for example, the multicultural/emergent children were no more subtle or “expert” in their judgments than any other children.
3. Children in the multicultural programs tended to view all children, regardless of race, in a relatively more positive light, and this tendency increased as they got older (i.e. from age 4 to 6).
4. Most important of all, the program orientation did affect the children’s knowledge and attitudes, even at (or perhaps because of) their young age.

Questions