Matthew Sysa Blog 6

            The reading for this week was chapter six of the textbook. This chapter talked about the complex role of socialization in schools. One topic that they talked about was social identity. Social identity is when many “smaller groups of friends exist within the school setting, and these peer groups often have names that suggest the lifestyle characteristics of the members” (p. 183). This reminded me of a movie from my adolescence called Mean Girls. In the movie all of the students are separated into groups called social cliques, for instance they had the plastics, jocks, Asian nerds and the desperate wannabes just to name a few. Often these cliques did not interact with one another and they sometimes resorted to “physical and emotional abuse” (p. 185) as well as “peer rejection” (p. 185) towards members of other cliques, their own or even to individual students who may be attempting to join a clique. The reality is that these cliques continue to exist in our schools and that they continually find ways to outcast and humiliate students often through the use of bullying against those who are different and do not fit in.

Discussion Question: How can we teach students in early years about the importance of accepting all of their peers, rather than out casting the ones they may find to be different?