Young children's moral evaluations of inclusion and exclusion in play in ethnic and aggressive stereotypic peer contexts

ABSTRACT

Previous research has emphasised the importance of active citizenship in the early years for the development of tolerant and cohesive societies. This paper reports data from 174 children, aged 6–7 years, who were interviewed in the first year of a longitudinal study. Children were presented with two scenarios about inclusion of others in play. One scenario focussed on a peer from a different ethnic background and the other scenario was about a peer who was aggressive to others. Children were asked about their reasons to include or exclude the other child. Children were more likely to include the peer from a different ethnic background than the aggressive peer and cited moral or prosocial reasons. Children were also asked if they would still include or exclude, if friends or teachers disagreed with their decision. Most children maintained their original judgement in the face of contrary views by their peers but were more likely to change their opinion if a teacher disagreed. The implications of these findings for teachers in early childhood education are discussed with a focus on understanding contextual influences on children’s moral judgements and how children come to value diverse perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral development
• early childhood
• social inclusion
• social cognition
• stereotypes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DP130102136].

Notes on contributors

Sue Walker

Dr Susan Walker is a Professor in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at QUT and a key researcher in the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Living with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Her research interests include epistemic beliefs and teachers' practice; early childhood social development; child outcomes in relation to inclusive early childhood education programs; early intervention and the transition to school.

Jo Lunn-Brownlee

Jo Lunn-Brownlee is a Professor in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education, Faculty of Education at QUT. Over the last decade she has researched extensively in the field of personal epistemology (beliefs we hold about knowledge and knowing) in teaching and teacher education, with a particular focus on early years teacher education. She has been lead chief investigator on three Australian Research Council Discovery grants since 2006 which collectively investigated how early years professionals' beliefs about knowledge and knowing influence their interactions with young children.

Laura Scholes

Laura Scholes is an Associate Professor of educational research in the Institute of Learning Science and Teacher Education (ILSTE) at Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, Australia. Her research focuses on children's epistemic cognition related to reasoning; gender and schooling, and how to improve students' literacy learning through evaluative practices.

Eva Johansson

Eva Johansson is Professor of Education, at the Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Stavanger, Norway. She is an experienced researcher in the field of early childhood education with an extensive research and publication profile in the area of values education, issues of democracy and children's morality.

Eva Johansson's affiliation details are as you had in the proof, this was correct. I was responding to what I thought was the query that author affiliations should reflect where the research was carried out which obviously was not Norway. Apologies for the misunderstanding, there is no correction needed to affiliation details.