Peer Relationships Among Minority and
Majority Children in Denmark
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Fulbright Scholar Judith Tate Wagner giving the keynote address at the conference “A Good Childhood for Everyone?
Denmark’s Minority and Majority Children in
Integrated Schools” sponsored by the Danish Fulbright commission. |
Judith Tate Wagner, professor of
education at Whittier College and director of the Broadoaks Children’s
School of Whittier College, was concerned by research suggesting
that minority children were at signifi cant social risk in Denmark’s
newly integrated schools. She used her semester as a Fulbright Scholar
in Denmark in spring 2003 to teach the doctoral seminar, "Children’s
Ethnic Identity Development, Peer Relationships, and Multicultural
Education" at Denmark’s Danish University of Education. She also conducted
research on the formation of ethnic identity and mutual perceptions of
minority and majority children in Danish schools and preschools, and
shared her expertise in the field of diverse education.
"My Fulbright semester in Denmark was a high point in my personal
and professional life. It gave me the opportunity to study ethnic
identity development and peer relationships among minority and
majority children in a society where multiculturalism is a relatively new
phenomenon, against the backdrop of Nordic egalitarianism," Wagner enthused.
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Danish children playing during school. |
Inspired by Wagner’s work, the Fulbright commission in Denmark,
the Danish-American Foundation, sponsored a conference in February
2004 on the academic and social experiences of minority and majority
children in Danish schools. The conference was so successful that a
second conference was immediately organized for the following year.
"I love the way that this topic has taken off in the last couple of years and
think that Fulbright has played a major role in raising consciousness and
opening the debate," commented Wagner.
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Danish children talking during a break at school. |
Wagner has co-edited two books with Nordic scholars which
discuss immigration and integration as important emerging issues:
Early Childhood Education in Five Nordic Countries (2003) and
Nordic Childhoods and
Early Education: Policy,
Research and Practice (2006). She continues to
communicate regularly
with Nordic researchers,
and in April 2006
joined six of them in
presenting a seminar on
“Nordic Childhoods and
Early Education” at the
American Educational
Research Association’s
annual meeting.
"I have come back to my
home institution enlightened and energized by the experience of living
and working in another country. I have redesigned two courses, using the
Nordic concept of en god barndom (the good childhood) to spark more
thorough and critical examination of basic, often unconscious American
assumptions about children and how to teach them.
"Another unanticipated benefit of my Fulbright Scholar experience has been the
cultivation of new relationships with other college faculty members. I have
had the opportunity to help two faculty colleagues, one in religious studies
and one in anthropology, write Fulbright applications. Although I had
known these colleagues in passing, our shared interest in Fulbright has
furthered the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration on campus and, more
specifically, has sparked on-going conversations about our research and
teaching," Wagner said.
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| "International education
exchange is the most significant current project
designed to continue the process of humanizing
mankind to the point, we would hope, that
nations can learn to live in peace"
--J. William Fulbright |
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