ELEMENT STATEMENT: Preservice education students are helped to examine their attitudes toward other ethnocultural groups. They are taught about the dynamics of prejudice and racism and about how to deal with these attitudes in the classroom.

THE BIG PICTURE: It is crucial that preservice students understand prejudice, racism, discrimination, and the means for combating such adverse attitudes in the classroom. It is equally important that they become aware of their own attitudes toward people who differ from themselves.

Prejudice, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is "an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts" (p. 977). In his classic work titled The Nature of Prejudice, Allport (1954) defines prejudice as "an avertive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply because he belongs to that group, and is therefore presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to the group" (p. 7).

Racism is "the notion that one's ethnic stock is superior" (p. 1021). By changing the word's root (for example, sexism, classism, or ageism), the meaning changes to the notion that one's sex, socioeconomic class, or generation is superior. The dynamics of all the "isms" pose similar problems, though those associated with racism have proved to be especially virulent and persistent.

Discrimination is "an act based on prejudice" (p. 404).

While prejudice is typically used in reference to individuals, racism tends to be applied to both individuals and institutions. When acted upon, racism results in discrimination, which can be seen on an institutional scale within society in such practices as:

• Real estate block-busting and the encouragement of white flight.

• The denial of credit to women and minorities.

• The undue assumption of guilt and subsequent harassment of minorities by police.

In education, as in society at large, institutional racism mitigates against equity. One example is the disproportionate placement of minority students in lower academic tracks and their consequent unequal access to high-status knowledge (Oakes, 1985). Another example is the discrepancy in funding between schools serving poor minority students and those serving more affluent white students (Kozol, 1991).

Prejudice, racism, and discrimination affect both institutions and individuals. No one goes unscathed--neither perpetrators nor victims. Depending upon their personalities and life experiences, people who are objects of prejudice may respond in the following ways:

• hypersensitivity
• withdrawal and passivity
• clowning
• strengthening ties with one's group
• trying extra hard
• militancy
• permitting the stereotype to become self-fulfilling

Unfortunately, these responses may exacerbate the problem (Sleeter & Grant, 1994). The relatively recent phenomenon of minority students resisting academic pursuits in order not to be perceived by their peers as "acting white" might be added to the list of responses to prejudice (see Ogbu, 1992; Kohl, 1994).

Prejudice is both cognitive and affective. Lack of cognitive sophistication can manifest itself in stereotypic thinking.

According to Byrnes (1988), numerous factors contribute to the affective dimension of prejudice. Among these factors are:

• The observation and internalization of attitudes in the community.

• The influence of respected elders.

• The influence of peers.

• The desire to be part of the in-group.

• Lack of interaction with people whose culture differs from one's own, as in some rural and suburban settings.

• The influence of the media.

• Low self-concept.

GOALS:

• Teacher educators will help preservice students understand the nature and causes of prejudice and racism.

• Teacher educators will help preservice students become familiar with research-based instructional approaches for reducing prejudice.

IMPLICATIONS FOR ACTION: Within programs of teacher education, preservice students should participate in experiences aimed at the reduction of prejudice. They also should become aware of research-based approaches to the amelioration of prejudice, and become capable of designing and implementing appropriate experiences for their future students. These competencies should stem from the understanding that prejudice is both cognitive and affective; therefore, approaches to its reduction should appeal to both domains.

In a summary of the research, Pate (1988) identifies and comments upon the relative effectiveness of eight approaches to reducing prejudice in students. Those approaches are: the showing of films and audiovisual programs that portray multicultural experiences, the study of multiethnic books, analysis of thinking processes, cooperative learning, human relations training, anti-prejudice lessons or units, schoolwide strategies such as heterogeneous grouping and multicultural curricula, and teacher education for diversity.

In a similar review of pertinent research, Byrnes (1988) identifies four general approaches for reducing prejudice: social contact, self-esteem and mental health, cognitive sophistication, and empathy.

• Social Contact: According to contact theory, increased social contact with members of other ethnic or racial groups contributes to acceptance of differences and improved attitudes toward those groups. In his seminal work, The Nature of Prejudice, Allport (1954) articulates the conditions of contact theory:

"Prejudice...may be reduced by equal-status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if this contact is sanctioned by institutional supports...and provided it is of a sort that leads to the perception of common interests and common humanity between members of the two groups." (p. 281)

The clear implication, in pedagogical terms, is that engaging students of diverse cultures in cooperative learning will catalyze the reduction of prejudice. Research, in fact, supports this implication when the conditions of contact theory are present in certain types of cooperative learning situations (Slavin, 1995). When preservice students experience appropriate cooperative learning in the teacher education classroom, they likely will develop instructional competencies that they can use in their future classrooms.

• Self-Esteem and Mental Health: In the research related to prejudice and its reduction, a healthy self-concept emerges as a prime predictor of lesser amounts of prejudice (Byrnes, 1988; Pate, 1988). High self-concept derives in part from safe, accepting environments--classrooms included. High self-esteem also comes from a student's academic achievement (Kohn, 1994), which, in turn, is strongly influenced by the teacher's expectations. Zeichner (1993) and others have identified high expectations for all students as a crucial trait of effective teachers of diverse groups of learners. Teacher educators, as well, should strive to create safe, accepting classroom environments in which high expectations prevail and meaningful, engaged learning occurs.

• Cognitive Sophistication: Walsh (1988) describes several classroom strategies for promoting critical thinking in conjunction with prejudice reduction. One strategy is to have students analyze syllogisms for faulty reasoning and overgeneralizations.

Exercises in flexible thinking provide an additional avenue for critical thinking and prejudice reduction (Walsh, 1988). To avoid stereotypic thinking, students might practice categorizing things and people in a variety of ways. Such activities should strive to develop in students a "tolerance for ambiguity" (Williams, 1971). To enhance the possibility of transfer, the thought processes in such critical and creative thinking activities should be highlighted and discussed as they apply to real-world situations regarding prejudice. Prospective teachers' capacity to provide experiences conducive to cognitive sophistication among their future students is enhanced when they routinely engage in metacognitive and flexible thinking in the teacher education classroom.

• Empathy: Empathy goes beyond tolerating viewpoints different from one's own to feeling from a variety of perspectives. "Walking a mile in another's shoes," if only in the imagination, defines empathy. Byrnes (1988), Walsh (1988), and Pate (1988) suggest several experiences conducive to the development of empathy. These experiences include:

• Participating in simulations, such as Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes (Peters, 1971).

• Viewing and discussing films that sympathetically portray characters from different ethnic groups.

• Reading multicultural children's literature. (Refer to Cullinan & Galda, 1993; Harris, 1997; Norton, 1995; Tomlinson & Lynch-Brown, 1996.)

To promote preservice students' ability to design and implement empathy-inducing instructional experiences, the instructor should engage preservice students in such experiences.

These four approaches--social contact under appropriate conditions, self-esteem, cognitive sophistication, and empathy--emerge from a review of the literature (Byrnes, 1988) as means to reduce prejudice in classrooms of children. As has been stressed, these same approaches should be modeled in the teacher education classroom as well. In addition to equipping preservice students with techniques for prejudice reduction in their future classrooms, these activities stimulate preservice students to examine their own attitudes toward people who differ from themselves.

Additional activities for the teacher education classroom include the following:

• Writing the first three words that pop into one's mind upon hearing a series of teacher prompts, which consist of labels for groups of people--e.g., feminists, African Americans, white males, obese people, American Indians. Students are then asked to review their lists and identify those descriptors that seem to indicate negative stereotypes. Working backwards from the present, students might trace the origins of their prejudice and discuss the means from which this prejudice might have stemmed at different points in its development.

• Reading and discussing teachers' accounts of their encounters with prejudice in both themselves and their students, as in White Teacher (Paley, 1989).

• Exploring equity and inequity as they exist in society and in education.

• Discussing the wisdom of color blindness, or "difference blindness," with regard to individual attitudes as well as social and educational policy. Byrnes (1988) takes issue with color-blind perspectives:

"Denial of the differential weight given to human characteristics across cultures such as skin color, religious affiliation, or gender ignores a reality that most children have observed and often integrated into their own social attitudes and behavior."(p. 267)

The jurisprudential model (see chapter 15 of Joyce & Weil, 1996), with color blindness and color consciousness as the conflicting value orientations, suggests a useful framework for stimulating discussion.

OBSTACLES TO ACTION: Preservice students may be reluctant to assess their own perceptions of and attitudes toward other cultural and ethnic groups. They may experience disequilibrium, or they may display resistance to participating in classroom activities that investigate prejudice and stereotypic thinking.

DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW: Some educators protest that the elementary, secondary, and teacher education curricula are already crammed and there is no room for adding units on prejudice. Other educators reply that the reduction of prejudice is a moral imperative and room must be made.

Some educators argue that the addition of lessons and units on prejudice has little likelihood of actually reducing prejudice in individuals. Their arguments are valid. Just as knowledge alone does not effect changes in attitudes (Byrnes, 1988), neither do direct, additive approaches (Pate, 1988). Teachers certainly should seize the teachable moment and address prejudice and racism whenever such attitudes appear. However, they also should strive to integrate strategies for prejudice reduction throughout the curriculum--at both the pre-college and teacher education levels. In Banks' (1993) descriptions of approaches for integrating multicultural content into the curriculum, the transformation approach and the social action approach provide guidance for such integration.

Grant (1990) takes issue with the use of social contact to reduce prejudice in educational settings. His critique points out the following factors: Contact theory seems to assume that all students should readily accept the norms and characteristics of white culture; the current research does not reflect studies of contact between different racial groups; approaches based on contact theory typically focus on contact between individual members of different groups; and the theory does not address the roles of school culture and curriculum in promoting interracial contact. He advocates efforts that are comprehensive--both in the analysis of interracial problems and in the development of solutions to such problems.

References

Additional Reading for Elements 2 and 3