Stop the Exclusion!

I am a Masters student in the Early Childhood Education program at Boston University School of Education. Therefore, I am interested in anything related to the education of young children. I like to be playful and open-minded, and I believe that play based schools are very beneficial to children.

Recently, however, I have come across the idea that gender stereotypes are rooted since very early in life. I believe gender stereotypes to be a threat to the total inclusion in the play of children. The problem is that society has set the motion for us to believe that there are two mutually exclusive gender roles. This makes children believe that certain games, toys, or attitudes are specific to one’s gender. Therefore, it results in a lot of discrimination, prejudice, and peer exclusion. As a teacher, I believe that the more diverse the group is, the more a child can learn. As a result, I think it is very important to try and put a stop to this.

I have read a couple of articles that talk about experiments in which researchers manipulate the environment where the children play. Sometimes, they manipulate it in a way in which gender is very salient, other times they do the opposite. The results yield that when gender is salient, children start to conform more to gender stereotypes and that is when peer exclusion begins (Patterson and Bigler, 2006, & Hilliard and Liben, 2010).

For future steps as a teacher, I will make sure to think about the ways I design my early childhood classroom. The way in which I manipulate the environment will give the children social cues as to what is acceptable and what is not. I believe that if I try to erase the stereotypes from a younger age, maybe peer exclusion will be reduced in later years.

References

Hilliard, L. J., & Liben, L. S. (2010). Differing levels of gender salience in preschool

classrooms: Effects on children’s gender attitudes and intergroup bias. Child Development, 81(6), 1787-1798.

Patterson, M. M., & Bigler, R. S. (2006). Preschool children's attention to environmental messages about groups: Social categorization and the origins of intergroup bias. Child Development, 77(4), 847-860.