Hilary Blahey-Hasay Blog 6

              Chapter 6 discusses Socialization in the Schooling Process. I believe school is the best environment for practicing socialization and developing social skills that will be relevant for the rest of students’ lives. It is very important to foster these skills as they will remain relevant and become crucially important as students continue to interact with various people throughout day-to-day life and throughout the world. I chose to focus this blog on the dimensions of socialization, those being; behavioral conformity, moral conformity, and cultural conformity (p. 163). I believe that the most difficult dimension to instruct students in is cultural conformity. Behaviors are intuitively learned and supported through teacher guidance and morals are developed naturally over time. Although “learning about accepted perspectives and styles of expression” (p. 164) – cultural conformity is something that takes students a much longer time to fully understand. I believe this is so because oftentimes students may have their own opinions about culturally related styles and expression although conform to those that are dominant in their schools. This thought relates very much so to the school climate, being “the sense of belonging to a school community” (p. 181). If we create schools that do not force children to conform, but rather allow them to be who they are by generating a warm and welcoming school climate we will ensure that students feel positively about social processes that occur within the school, but also those that occur throughout their daily lives and into their futures.

Discussion Question: What are some examples from your practicum school that help generate a warm and welcoming school climate? Do you have any suggestions?