Beyond integration: How teachers can encourage cross-racial friendships
LA JOHNSON/NPR
There's a reason Jose Luis Vilson's students learn in groups: He wants them to feel comfortable working with anyone in the classroom, something he's realized in his 11 years of teaching doesn't always come naturally.
"I don't really give students a chance to self-select until later on, when I feel like they can pretty much group with anybody," he says.
Vilson teaches math at a public middle school just north of Harlem in New York City. Most of his students are Latino and African-American, and Vilson pays close attention to the fact that their racial identities affect their experiences in the classroom.
Children entering adolescence, he knows, are less likely to maintain cross-racial friendships as they grow older. But teachers like him may be able to help change that, according to a new study led by researchers from New York University.
In past decades, it's become increasingly clear that diversity in classrooms isn't just a buzzword. A growing body of research points to classroom diversity as an important aspect of childhood development. Kids who make friends with kids of other races tend to be more socially well-adjusted, more academically ambitious and better at interacting with people who are different from them.
The NYU researchers knew of these findings and wondered if just putting kids of different races in classrooms together is enough to foster lasting connections. Their hypothesis was that, as kids grow into early adolescence, they increase their same-race friendships and decrease their cross-race friendships.
So they looked at data from the Early Adolescent Development Study (EADS), a longitudinal survey where researchers questioned more than 500 elementary- and middle-schoolers over the course of two academic years: fall 1996 to spring 1998. The students in the study all went to school in one district in the American Beyond integration: How teachers can encourage cross-racial friendships | 89.3 KPCC: