Abstract
Teacher judgments and the disciplinary sanctioning of pupils can be understood as a function of the ethnic match, which means whether or not teachers and pupils have the same ethnic background. According to social identity theory, teachers should be motivated to protect positive self-esteem and therefore favour pupils of their ethnic in-group over pupils of their ethnic out-group. Following system justification theory however, it must be assumed that teachers also base their judgments and their disciplinary behaviour on the acceptance of social hierarchies. According to this theory, ethnic minority teachers should therefore favour ethnic majority pupils over ethnic minority pupils. We test these hypotheses by conducting an experimental study among 196 preservice teachers. The results suggest that ethnic majority participants do not discriminate against ethnic minority pupils. However, although ethnic minority participants seem to explicitly favour their in-group, they also implicitly tend to have more negative stereotypes about them. Moreover, the more negative explicit and implicit stereotypes ethnic minority participants have against pupils of their in-group, the more severely they punish pupils of their out-group. This could suggest that ethnic minority participants felt the desire to compensate for a negative view of their in-group by treating their out-group more harshly.
Highlights
Numerous studies have shown that disciplinary behaviour by teachers is often discriminatory
In North Rhine-Westphalia, raising awareness of the situation and language difficulties of ethnic minority pupils in the school system has become an important part of the teacher training curriculum (LABG 2009). 58% of respondents were at an advanced stage in their study programme, but we have no information whether they had attended a course on this part of the curriculum and if so, what exactly had been taught
In question 1 we addressed the disciplinary practice of preservice teachers as a function of the ethnic match
Summary
Numerous studies have shown that disciplinary behaviour by teachers is often discriminatory. One of the possible explanations for the discriminatory treatment of ethnic minority pupils could be collectively shared stereotypes, understood as "cognitive structures containing the recipient’s knowledge, beliefs and expectations of a human social group" African-American pupils are more likely to be rated as "troublemakers" than white pupils even if their behaviour is no different (Okonofua and Eberhardt 2015), and teachers expect more disruptive behaviour of this group in future even if current behaviour is the same as that of white pupils (Kunesh and Noltemeyer 2019). Negative stereotypes about ethnic minority pupils seem to contribute to discriminatory treatment and judgments by teachers
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