Boyce – learner centered practices

Studies always change, as you conduct them, and one of the changes that we made in this study very early on came about because of the things that we were hearing from our research assistants as they came back from the schools they were doing the observations. They would come back and say, “This kindergarten class over here is very different from this one over here. They’re just completely different climates, cultures; they’re very, very different places”. And we started asking them how, and what they were seeing, and so on. The kinds of things they began telling us about were things like the degree to which the teacher focuses on individual children opposed to the group. How the teacher, how the teacher relates to the hierarchy as it emerges. Does he or she try to kind of level the playing field or do, does the teacher make use of the hierarchy to help control behaviour; what’s kind of the approach to that.  

So we added to the study a set of measures of what are called, learner-centered pedagogical practices. And these are well worked out within the education field. They have to do with the approach and the philosophy of the teacher toward the management of social/emotional relationships within the classroom. It turns out that even within Berkley, California, one of the most egalitarian places on the planet that teachers really vary in how sort of hierarchically- versus egalitarian-oriented they are with their class of 20 five year olds. And what we have found is that in the classes where the teachers really ignore the hierarchy and don’t engage in these kind of learner centered practices, the relationship between hierarchal position and depression for example is quite, quite steep. The kids who are in the subordinate positions have much higher rates of depression than do the kids who were in the dominant positions. But interestingly, when you look at the same relationship in classes where the teachers have lots of learner-centered practices it’s almost flat. So it’s just like with nations where there are differences in the slope of the hierarchy defining the association between social position and health, we see the same exact thing within kindergarten classrooms.