Course Description
Race, gender, and class as explanatory frameworks for incidents in young children's everyday lives and approaches for culturally responsive teaching.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Students in the graduate section of this course will complete an additional project. These project options will include an Annotated Bibliography: A total of 15 citations, of which 10 must be peer-reviewed scholarly articles no older than 10 years prior to the year in which the course is offered; each annotation should be approximately 1 page. Final Paper: A 3,000-3,500 word APA-formatted paper in which candidates will draw from educative experiences as students as well as their experiences in the field experience for this course. Candidates will synthesize research findings, their own experiences, and their aspirations for their own classroom.
Athena Title
Children's Social Lives
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students will consider childhood as a social construction and a variable of social analysis. Students will summarize the research on children's sharing and social participation, ways of dealing with confusion, fears, and conflicts, and attempts to deal with adult rules and authority. Students will examine and synthesize major research findings related to the interactive outcomes of race, gender, and class in children's social lives. Students will plan, implement, and interpret an action research project based on everyday classroom incidents, theoretical/conceptual foundations, and recent research findings. Students will examine and discuss aspects of children's friendships, fighting, teasing, name-calling, bullying, and social networks in children's social lives. Students will identify and examine the ways in which children's social lives unite the caring and motivational aspects of learning school settings.
Topical Outline
•Theoretical foundations of children's social lives in culturally diverse classrooms. •Research on children's social lives in culturally diverse classrooms. •Ways of studying children's social lives in culturally diverse classrooms. •Issues of friendships, fighting, teasing, name-calling, bullying, and social networks in children's social lives in culturally diverse classrooms. •Children's social lives in culturally diverse classrooms as motivational contexts for learning.