Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools

Abstract

Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools, by Walter Stephan. New York: Teachers College Press, 1999. 143 pp. $22.95, paper. Reviewed by Lauri Johnson, The State University of New York at Buffalo. I was riding the subway to work recently while reading Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools, a title in James A. Banks' Multicultural Education series. Staring at the title of the book, a young White woman in her thirties sitting across from me caught my eye. I'll bet that's a good Are you a teacher? A teacher of I replied. And it is a good book. Her comment left me pondering the current state of race relations, school integration, and teacher education in urban America. Do educators really want to deal with racial prejudice and stereotyping in schools? As a society, do we have the will (Hilliard, 1991) to educate all children and the knowledge base and pedagogical skills to create equitable classrooms? In this age of accountability, standards, and high stakes assessments when poor children of color are increasingly racially isolated and pushed out of substandard urban schools, we need books that remind us of the critical role that schooling can play in intergroup relations and the creation of a democratic society. Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools helps marshal the evidence and chart the path for equitable and integrated educational environments for all students. Because residential segregation continues to be pervasive, schools remain one of the few places that children have an extended opportunity for contact with those from different racial or ethnic backgrounds, although that opportunity is rapidly disappearing as many schools re-segregated in the 1990s (Orfield & Yun, 1999). If there is one thing that social psychological theory and research have taught us about racially and ethnically diverse environments, simply putting children from different backgrounds together is not enough to ensure positive social outcomes (Schofield, 1995). The hearts and minds of students, teachers, and administrators must be transformed to ensure that all children experience equal status in the life of the school. Walter Stephan, a social psychologist who has studied intergroup relations for 30 years, summarizes and synthesizes the current state of psychological theory and research on stereotyping, prejudice, contact theory, and improving intergroup relations. In Chapters One and Two he painstakingly details the complex psychological theories about how stereotypes (beliefs) are formed and prejudice (attitudes) develops in the individual psyche. Stephan encourages readers not to skim over the complicated nuances between various theories. Indeed, it was only after rereading these chapters that I emerged with an understanding of the important differences between seven new theories of prejudice which include symbolic racism theory, social dominance theory, social identity theory, and integrated threat theory. As the author notes, however, these theories were developed to explain the prejudicial attitudes of college students and adults, but we still know little about how these theories might operate in children. In Chapter Three, Stephan provides an updated discussion of contact theory that serves as the basis for the most widely used techniques for improving intergroup relations. In addition to the four factors that were central to the early formation of the contact hypothesis (i. …

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