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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:
Why do you suppose that multicultural education worked only in conjunction with an emergent curriculum? Imagine that you writing a brief summary of this study for a school newsletter, and that you need to comment on this question. What would you say about it?
Skeptics might say that the study assessed only what children say about race, not how children might act in racially related situations. In an interview, in other words, a child might express positive sentiments about every race or ethnic group, but still behave in prejudiced ways during play or other activities at school. Is this a legitimate criticism of the Perkins and Mebert study? How could you devise another study to test whether there is truth to the criticism?
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