Examining Cross-Age Peer Conversations Relevant to Character: Can a Digital Story About Bullying Promote Students’ Understanding of Humility?

Abstract

Successful character education programs are commonly marked by components including conversations about moral issues; however, little is known about what students actually talk about in such programs. Using initial data from the Arthur Interactive Media Buddy Project, this study examined whether a digital comic about bullying generated meaningful conversations surrounding humility. The sample was 52 cross-age peers in elementary school. Analyses involved an iterative, deductive-inductive coding process resulting in a total of ten codes, of which three were most readily identified in peers’ conversations: perspective taking, affect labeling, and empathic responding. Limitations and implications relevant to character education are discussed.

FUNDING

This article was supported in part by grants from the John Templeton Foundation.

Notes

¹ Produced by the WGBH Educational Foundation, Arthur first aired in 1996 and is the longest running animated series for children in the United States. Episodes have an all-animal cast whose characters are faced with a variety of issues that young children also face, such as friendship and family problems.

² For a more detailed description of the sessions and procedures for pairing buddies, see Bowers et al. (in press).

³ The comic’s homepage is sourced on the official PBS-hosted Arthur website and can be found here: http://pbskids.org/arthur/games/comic_sofunny/index.html. If the site cannot be accessed, please contact the first author.

⁴ For example, Sue Ellen’s endings included children exploring what would happen if she had simply ignored the problem, talked to her parents about what was going on, or retaliated against Arthur. As well, students had a similar range of helpful and less helpful behaviors to choose from for for the Arthur and Buster characters.

⁵ For more detailed information about the coding process, including the coding opportunities, and the final coding manual, see Bowers et al. (in press).

⁶ A detailed description of the scenes and specific coding opportunities within scenes is available upon request to the first author.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported in part by grants from the John Templeton Foundation.