Investigating children’s perspective taking and normative frames of social understanding: A critical design ethnographic study of teacher-led dialogue around stories in early years’ classrooms

Abstract Social communication with adults and peers supports children to play a shared, active, and reflective role in negotiating meaning and making sense of their own social experiences. Through these conversations, children begin to adopt narrative structures, heuristics and rules which help them to organise and explain the social world, but these shortcuts also prompt biases in how children process social information and make judgments about how to engage with others. One of these biases, called the ‘Fundamental Attribution Error’ (Jones & Harris, 1967), also referred to as ‘correspondence bias’ or ‘attribution bias’ is the tendency to make dispositional judgments while overlooking situational factors in considering others’ perspectives and explaining behaviour. It emerges between 4 and 6 years of age in western cultures (Seiver, Gopnik, & Goodman, 2013) and is a precursor to stereotyping. This bias has spurred vast research exploring underlying mechanisms and approaches to intervention which are largely focused on promoting situational explanations of others’ perspectives. In addition to these structured intervention approaches, some researchers have raised the wider issue of the role educators and caregivers can play in reflecting on and challenging broader social norms that frame children’s dispositional judgments. I partnered with six early years teachers to investigate how teacher-led classroom dialogue around stories could challenge children’s normative frames of social understanding, promote children’s context-sensitive perspective taking, and lessen dispositional judgments. I also homed in on the role of teachers’ reflective practice in supporting children to think and negotiate meaning together in ways that reduce attribution bias. Findings demonstrate how ‘normative frames’ (i.e. expectations about how people tend to behave in specific circumstances and ideas about what kinds of behaviour are socially valued) guided children’s dispositional judgments of characters. Findings also show how, through processes of positioning within the group and with support from teachers, children questioned and shifted their normative frames over the course of the discussions, which was associated with greater context-sensitive perspective taking and fewer decontextualized dispositional judgments. In their reflections, teachers demonstrated how they took ownership of their own professional development within the project, however they also reported that receiving ongoing personalised feedback and support from me during and after the discussions helped them to find new ways to extend the children’s thinking further. In this thesis, I have proposed a conceptual framework which outlines the mechanisms by which children’s normative frames and perspective taking might link together to promote or inhibit attributional bias in the context of classroom dialogue around stories. This framework posits that relational reasoning and attributionally-biased reasoning are not mutually exclusive but counterbalanced, as if on a weighing scale. Further, these two types of reasoning are upheld by a central pillar of shared social reasoning, involving an interconnected process of normative framing and perspective taking. In this model, the type of reasoning that becomes more dominant for children largely depends on guided participation with adults and peers, especially within the context of conversation about social life. Further, small group dialogue around stories is conceptualised as a lever that teachers can use to challenge children’s normative frames and promote greater context-sensitive perspective taking in order to tip the scale toward relational reasoning and reduce the pull of attributional bias. On the whole, this project extends Educational Design Research and Design Ethnography, providing a model for how educational specialists, researchers, or advisors can support teachers to play a more active and reflective role in children’s developing social reasoning.The School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Gonville and Caius Colleg