Class 22: Childhood

Class Notes

 As we've talked about in this class, childhood is an important part of identity and role formation.  Today we're going to use the topics previously discussed in this class and apply them to aspects of childhood. 

Watch a Frontline video, A Class Divided,  of a teacher instructing her children about the dangers of inequality.  Watch chapters 1 and 2.

1. What sorts of concepts previously discussed in this class were evident in the video?
1. Self-fulfilling prophecy - when the blue-eyed children were the bad children, they did worse than when they were the good children.  
2. Confirmation bias - the teacher and students were able to find examples to fit existing stereotypes 
3. Social Construction - the teacher was able to externalize a viewpoint (brown eyed children are better than blue eyed children).  The idea went through a process of objectivation when the students started to use the viewpoint in everyday talk-- when the brown-eyed assumption took on a life of its own separate from the creator.  It finally went through the internalization process when it was accepted as fact by the students as the day progressed.
2. What sort of an effect can a teacher have on children?

In 1968 (and replicated in 1992), researchers told gave IQ tests to a classroom of 2nd graders. They randomly selected students to be either "spurters" or regular students, and reported these groupings to the teachers without notifying the teachers it was randomly assigned. They hypothesized that the students labeled "spurters" would be given more attention in the course of the class and would do better by the end of the year, which was found to be true by comparing end of the year test scores of "spurters" with the scores of regular students. This phenomenon, largely attributed to self-fulfilling prophecy, is called the Pygmalion Effect (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1992).

These teachers may not have consciously known that they were treating one group better than another.  Instead, it may have been an implicit bias they had toward (what they thought of as) smarter students over less intelligent students. 

Activity

Go through two implicit association tests here.  What were your results? Do you agree with the results?  What effect could these implicit associations have in your daily life and on others you interact with?  Do you think anything can be done to overcome them? 

Works Cited

Rosenthal, Robert & Lenore Jacobson. 1992. Pygmalion in the classroom. Expanded edition. New York: Irvington