Intergroup conflicts impair the healthy development of minority group students as well as the overall cooperation and effective functioning of multicultural communities, such as classrooms and schools. Even though many intervention programs effectively address negative intergroup attitudes, few interventions aim at systematically integrating social and academic learning. Literary studies provide a rich context for challenging prejudice and for promoting social-cognitive reflections. Particularly, high-quality literary fiction is characterized by complexity, such as non-stereotypical figure descriptions, that require the reader to refrain from automatic judgments and to engage in flexible and multi-perspective reasoning.
The goal of the current project is to investigate the effectiveness of the intervention program SKILL (“Soziale Kompetenzen über Jugendliteratur fördern“, “Promoting social skills through youth literature”). We developed the intervention program in a previous project, funded by Mercator Switzerland and Education21 (June 2018 – May 2021). SKILL uses small-group discussions about literary fiction to promote social reasoning regarding fairness, intergroup exclusion, peer group dynamics and civil courage in fourth- and fifth-grade students. In a two-day teacher training with accompanied coaching, teachers receive support in teaching SKILL in their classrooms. Over one school year, teachers and students read and discuss five works of literary fiction and connect the novels to the social life of their classroom. The main instructional strategy for promoting children’s social reasoning comes from Quality Talk, which supports teachers in facilitating small-group discussions about texts in order to promote students’ critical-analytical thinking in the upper elementary grades (Murphy, 2017).
We investigate the effectiveness of SKILL in forty classrooms (20 in the intervention group, 20 in the control group) and include three measurement points that cover two years (Pretest, Posttest, Follow-up). The study hypotheses build on a process model (Gasser & Dammert, 2019): We expect that the two-day teacher training and coaching will improve the quality of small-group discussions (i.e., the processes), which in turn will positively affect social reasoning, reading outcomes (i.e., proximal developmental outcomes) and peer relationships (i.e., distal outcome). In terms of a broader impact, SKILL addresses an important need in Swiss schools, as there is limited teacher training and little teaching material that provide specific instructions on how to integrate social learning on diversity, equal rights and tolerance into subject matters such as language arts.
