Children's Friendships In Culturally Diverse Classrooms

James G. Deegan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135720803
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Using material from American, Australian and British empirical studies, this book examines children's interests, needs, assets and capacities in multicultural classrooms and provides international comparisons on what it is like to "be" and "have" friends. The book also explores children's developing ideas of friendships and how they are linked to peer cultures And Looks Into How Such Friendships Can Motivate Children's Socializing in today's schools.

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Promise of Children’s Friendships in Culturally Diverse Classrooms

It is just a few short years from the promiscuity of the sandbox to the tormented possessive feelings of a fifth grader who has just learned that his best friend and only friend is playing at another classmate’s house after school. There maybe worse betrayals in store but none more influential than the sudden fickleness of an elementary school friend who has dropped us for someone more popular after all our careful, patient wooing. (Lopate, 1993, p. 79)

The world of children’s friendships is always under our feet; it can be heard, if we care to listen, in most homes that have children and in the parks and schoolyards where children play. This world is common-place but it largely goes unnoticed by most adults. (Ginsberg, Gottman, and Parker, 1986, p. 3)

To be and have friends is a fundamental human interest and concern. The traditional refrain that ‘schooldays are the happiest days of our lives,’ as Woods (1990) argues, frequently owes more to the joys of being and having friends than it does to the pleasures and rewards of academic learning. Yet, ironically, it is this popular perception that frequently obscures the promise of children’s friendships as motivational contexts for social learning in the present culture of schools and classrooms. Why children’s friendships should be an important topic of scientific investigation has a long history in psychological studies of children’s early social experiences (see Hartup, 1983), and a comparatively more recent history in sociological studies of childhood (Ambert, 1986; Corsaro, 1985, 1994; Corsaro and Eder, 1990; Denzin, 1977; James and Prout, 1990; Mayall, 1994).

The importance of children’s friendships has been rehearsed in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century speculative writings on the effects of social groups on human behavior by writers such as Thomas Horton Cooley, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Jean Piaget, and George Herbert Mead (see Renshaw, 1981). In the 1930s, Lewin’s seminal field-experimentalist approach for identifying the determinants of social interaction (Lewin and Lippitt, 1938; Lewin, Lippitt, and White, 1939) firmly established ‘dominant and dominating’ (James and Prout, 1990, p. 10) developmental trajectories in the research on children’s peer cultures. This dominance has endured, admittedly to a lesser extent, up to the present day.

The dominant developmental framework has been heavily influenced by the Piagetian inheritance on children’s social cognition. Piaget’s ‘genetic epistemology’ links ‘the biological facts of immaturity, such as dependence, to social aspects of childhood,’ ‘the universality of social practices surrounding childhood,’ and ‘the assumed naturalness of childhood’ (James and Prout, 1990, p. 10). The importance of children’s friendships has been conceptualized in terms of the immediate and enduring ‘functions’ of friendships throughout the developmental lifespan. Examples of the functions that friendships serve in childhood include ‘the positive, promotive influences of general peer interaction on children’s current and long-term adjustment and maturity’ (see Ginsberg, Gottman, and Parker, 1986, p. 5). More specifically, Gottman, Ginsberg, and Parker (1986) state that the following six functions are evident in the developmental research on children’s friendships and friendship expectations: companionship, stimulation, physical support, ego support/enhancement, social comparison, and intimacy/affection (pp. 6–11).

In complement and counterpoint to the dominant developmental trajectory, an expanding corpus of ethnographic studies on a wide array of interactive processes in children’s peer cultures has gradually begun to emerge in the last quarter century (see Corsaro and Eder, 1990). This corpus includes the emergent integral strand of children’s friendships in culturally diverse contexts.

Corsaro and Eder (1990) situate children’s friendships within children’s broader social participation experiences in their peer cultures. More specifically, they describe children’s friendships as highly developed instances of the integrative functions of: sharing an activity, often signalled with the phrase ‘We’re friends, right?;’ communal sharing in ‘jump rope’ games (Goodwin, 1985); and ‘trading and bargaining’ (Mishler, 1979) in children’s early childhood education settings. Indeed, Corsaro and Eder (1990) cite Katriel’s (1987) study of ritualized sharing among Israeli children as an exemplar of the delicate nature of negotiation in children’s peer cultures. Yet, we have few studies of this kind. We need more studies that challenge the particularistic and universalistic claims of researchers from different traditions who have studied children’s friendships in the past. One area that needs to be more fully investigated is children’s ‘own’ perspectives on their friendships, and how their developing constructions of friendship become embedded in their social lives in culturally diverse classrooms.

The present work owes much to recent ethnographic studies of children’s friendships in mainstream (Fine, 1987; Pollard, 1985; Rizzo, 1989), and culturally diverse pre-school and elementary school classrooms (Corsaro, 1994; Davies, 1982; Grant, 1984; Schofield, 1981, 1982; Sleeter and Grant, 1986; Troyna and Hatcher, 1992). This book will include a range of recent research literature from psychology, anthropology, and sociology on children’s friendships from nursery school through middle school, with underrepresented sociological theories of childhood and children serving as the prismatic lens for description and interpretation. A specific focus of the book will be on early adolescence and the grade levels in upper elementary school and lower middle school that approximate this highly emotional transitional phase in children’s social lives.

Although some significant emergent studies have begun to challenge existing theoretical and conceptual orthodoxies, the research on children’s friendships in culturally diverse classrooms is still very much in the formative stages. Two notable challenges will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. One study is Corsaro’s (1994) comparative study of children’s deeply embedded collective and interpretive reproduction friendship processes in three early childhood education settings (an Italian scuola materna, a Head Start Program, and a private nursery school in the United States). The other study is Troyna’s and Hatcher’s (1992) study of the part that race and friendships played as plausible explanatory frameworks for incidents in children’s everyday lives in mainly white primary schools in Britain.

In recent years, the challenges of teaching and learning about children’s friendships has been closely related to multicultural and social reconstructionist approaches for developing interpersonal awareness, minimizing stereotypes and stereotyping, expressing personal feelings, promoting individual uniqueness and worth, and encouraging cross-group communication (Grant and Sleeter, 1989). There is, however, a lack of congruence between existing theory, emerging research, and popular action-based curricula aimed at fostering positive aspects of children’s friendships in culturally diverse schools and classrooms. I will argue throughout this book that children’s friendships deserve closer investigation because they are central to children’s social lives, influence the way children negotiate social participation, conflict, and adult rules and authority (Corsaro and Eder, 1990). It will also be argued that if we are to accurately reflect the realities of children’s friendships, then we need to systematically examine friendships in culturally diverse classrooms as complex phenomena that can potentially influence a wide range of classroom instructional and non-instructional processes. Simply, we need to discover the basic friendship processes at work in today’s continually changing classrooms.

Three Popular Misconceptions

What we typically understand as children’s friendships are commonplace phenomena that suffer from a number of popular misconceptions. Three illustrative examples are discussed here. One misconception relates to the fact that since friendship has been the topic of popular and academic attention for more than 2,000 years (Aries, 1962), there is little left to say about it. Indeed, the ancient Greeks are responsible for a number of unexhausted questions concerning friendships including ‘whether friendship is intrinsically singular and exclusive or plural and democratic…’ (p. 80). While it is true, as Lopate (1993) remarked, that great essayists such as Aristotle and Cicero, Seneca and Montaigne, Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Lamb, among several others, have all ‘taken their crack at it’ (p. 78), we need to look beyond the legacy of the great classical thinkers.

Additionally, simply juxtaposing classical perspectives on adult friendships with children’s developing understandings of friendships needs to be weighed judiciously. Such approaches tend to define friendships as highly developed interpersonal constructs, with little respect for children’s friendships as socially constructed processes. This is especially acute when discussing developmental and diversity themes.

In her recent book, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education (1992), Noddings provides an example of how the main criterion of friends wishing friends well ‘for their own sake’ (p. 98), which has been elaborated in Aristotelian Nicomachean Ethics, can provide a referent for caring in schools, while not minimizing the centrality of children in the challenge to care. Indeed, there is renewed interest in questions concerning ‘tensions’ between moral requirements and friendships (see Noddings, 1992; Edgerton, 1993). This topic has engaged the minds of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, among many others, earlier in the century. Put simply, the question that is often posed runs as follows: ‘When should moral requirements outweigh the demands of friendship?’ This is an inherent question in the discourse on children’s friendship, but one that needs more comprehensive examination than will be provided within the scope of this book. The routine privileging of adult perspectives on children’s friendships, however, will be discussed again with reference to popular misconceptions about friendships later in this chapter.

Leading contemporary popular writers such as Roald Dahl, Tracy Kidder, and Stephen King have succeeded admirably in combining the literary and social domains of reality in their writings on children’s friendships. Indeed many of us will have observed 10-year-old girls who have been inspired by the heroines’s phrase of ‘kindred spirits’ in Montgomery’s book, Anne of Green Gables (1944). Other readers will have observed generations of 10-year-old boys digging side by side with ‘raging desire’ for hidden treasure like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in Twain’s book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1995 [1884]). Indeed, much has been written in recent literary discourse on the morality of Huck’s struggle between the principle that demands he return the slave Jim, or break the principle and go to hell rather than turn on his friend (see Boostrom, 1994). But accounts such as these, which extend back to Antigone and Sophocles and forward to Spock and Kirk, notwithstanding their common-sense resonances, are essentially fictions.

Kidder’s book, Among Schoolchildren (1989) is noteworthy because it represents a potent example of the complementarity inherent in literary and social domains of children’s friendships in culturally diverse contexts. Although Kidder acknowledges the influences of histories of education (for example, Bowles and Gintis, 1976), sociological studies of teaching (for example, Jackson, 1968), and critiques of education (for example, Kozol, 1967), his approach is undeniably fueled from the literary vantage point. Quite simply, we need to complement the rich lineage of literary accounts of children’s friendships with sociological studies of children’s friendship activities, routines, rituals, concerns, and values as motivational contexts for learning in today’s culturally diverse classrooms. The challenge of combining literary and ethnographic accounts of friendships will be addressed in Chapter 5.

A second misconception relates to the fact that adults always know best when it comes to children’s friendships. This misconception privileges adult perspectives above what children often understand and act upon in their own friendships. It is especially relevant when it comes to the selection of children’s friendships. Although teacher-parent conferences typically follow scripted conversations focused on academic learning and progress, there are also those counter-intuitive moments when we get around to asking, ‘How’s Johnny doing socially?,’ ‘Has Janie any friends?,’ or ‘Is Tony a good “mixer”?’ Something twigs and we remember that, in addition to learning how to do complicated long division problems, friends continue to play key roles in what are often our most memorable positive and negative social learning experiences in school.

Sometimes it also registers that our own end-of-year fifth-grade class photograph with its pattern of relative ‘sameness’ looks a lot a different from our own child’s class photograph in today’s fifth-grade classroom. Whatever the significance of those garish bell-bottom trousers, leg-of-mutton sleeves, and Peter Pan collars as social status symbols, today, there is more to both sets of photographs than immediately meets the eye. There are ‘stories’ of friendships created, sustained, and broken in both photographs. Whether we actively or benignly address the potential of everyday situations like this, when the child within us and the child beside us confront each other, is part of the message in this book.

A third misconception relates to the fact that children’s friendships are often perceived as ‘common-sense’ social constructions. While there is much to be said for the wise use of common-sense knowledge, we need to more systematically examine the routines, rituals, activities and values of children’s social lives as dynamic processes and not as calcified ones. A common difficulty that some adults experience when addressing children’s friendships is their chameleon-like nature—they are highly colorful, elusive, and unpredictable phenomena. They are close but distant, more the stuff of anecdote than interpretation, and typically take place in the hurly-burly of playgrounds, lunchrooms, and around school hallways. They are often silent, detached, and invisible phenomena for some adults who stand in their midst everyday. I will suggest ways for negotiating involvement and detachment when addressing children’s friendships with diverse social groups in Chapters 4, 5, and 7.

Clearly, our operationalized understandings of children’s friendships both wittingly and unwittingly affect our selection of a wide range of instructional, management, and curricular decision-making processes (Deegan, 1993). I will argue that children’s friendships are full of ‘promise’, potentially robust, sophisticated social constructions, and that there is a place for adults in fostering positive learning environments for the development of children’s friendships.

Children’s Friendships ‘At Promise’

Beneath the benign appearances of children’s friendships lies a conceit. The path of friendship is fraught with ‘betrayals,’ ‘sudden fickleness,’ and failed ‘wooings.’ The parameters of harmony and hostility undergird the continuous negotiation of the ‘codes’ of children’s lore, language, and friendships (Corsaro, 1985; Davies, 1984; Fine, 1987; Opie and Opie, 1959 and 1969; Pollard, 1985). In similar vein to Swadener and Lubeck’s (1995) work on deconstructing the discourse of ‘risk,’ I suggest that we need to begin to utilize the construct of friendships ‘at promise’ to convey that all children’s friendships can potentially become motivational contexts for useful learning in our end-of-the-twentieth-century world. Throughout this book, the conceptual understanding of friendships ‘at promise’ will be used interchangeably with syntactical derivatives such as ‘promise, ‘promises,’ and ‘promising.’ The challenge of understanding the ‘promise’ of children’s friendships is the touchstone for this book.

This is not a book of ‘success stories’ but one about potential success stories. My approach is tempered by the realization that children’s friendships include many children’s versions of the negotiation and struggle towards equality and harmony. This approach suggests that children negotiate their friendships against backcloths of unique and contingent ‘mixes’ of contextual dissonances related to race, ethnicity, gender, class, community, disability, and an array of continually changing life-situational, sociocultural factors. In this book, I pose a set of ‘interrogatives’ which are intended to stimulate interrelatedness between my theoretical observations and data drawn from fieldwork and interviews in the following chapters.

The following basic interpretive question fueled my interests and concerns from the outset: Why is this friendship____(routine, ritual, activity, interest, concern, value) the way it is and not different? (see Erickson, 1984, p. 62). My intent was to remain aware of ‘the commonsense and taken-for-granted knowledge of the participants, and to suggest analytical concepts by which such tacit knowledge can be named and made available for reflection’ (Pollard, 1985, p. xi). The following questions build on Swadener and Lubeck’s (1995) set of ‘interrogatives,’ and are aimed at challenging cultural deprivation deficit models and contributing to the emergent discourse on children ‘at promise’ in current educational discourse. These ‘layered’ questions will be addressed in different ways, and at different junctures, in the next seven chapters:

1. Who has ‘promising’ friendships in culturally diverse classrooms?
2. Why are these friendships ‘promising’?
3. Who defines children’s friendships? How have the criteria for or definitions of friendships changed? What are the differences between children’s friendships and their broader social participation experiences in their peer cultures?
4. What is the ‘etiology’ of the concept of children’s friendships ‘at promise’? How is the emergent discourse one of ‘promise,’ ‘negotiation,’ and ‘nonsychrony.’ What are some of the complexities in the discourse of ‘promise’? In what ways does the concept of ‘promise’ reconcile tensions between harmony and conflict in children’s fri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: The Promise of Children’s Friendships in Culturally Diverse Classrooms
• Chapter 2: Theoretical Foundations of Children’s Friendships in Culturally Diverse Classrooms
• Chapter 3: Roots and Branches of Research on Children’s Friendship in Culturally Diverse Classrooms
• Chapter 4: Children’s Friendships in a Fifth grade Culturally Diverse Classroom in Atlanta, Georgia
• Chapter 5: The Friendly Cultural Stranger as Self-critical Reflexive Narrator
• Chapter 6: An Inquiry Approach for InvestigatingChildren’s Friendships with Student Teachers in a School— University Partnership
• Chapter 7: Two Student Teachers’ Beginning Professional Stories of Studying Children’s Friendships
• Chapter 8: Frontiers and Futures: Linking Theory,Research and Practice and the Challenge of Educational Reform
• References