In recent days, our society is increasingly marked by family diversity, but there are few efforts in the area of social studies education for students to inform changing family types to improve learners' understanding of family diversity. The purpose ...
In recent days, our society is increasingly marked by family diversity, but there are few efforts in the area of social studies education for students to inform changing family types to improve learners' understanding of family diversity. The purpose of this study was to apply children's books in a bid to bring a qualitative change to children's awareness of family diversity, one of elementary multicultural education themes. Children's books are the most accessible to children and provide them with superb secondhand experiences. The children's books for this study were selected by some criteria and graded based on the relationship with family diversity and the degree of difficulty. And lesson plans were prepared and applied in social studies instructions to see if those strategies brought any changes to school children's perception and attitudes of family diversity. The findings are as follows:
First, the children's books that dealt with family diversity as a subject matter or theme were selected and classified according to the degree of difficulty to make lists. The lists would make it easier for teachers who intend to provide education on family diversity by capitalizing on children's books to make a better choice by theme and degree of difficulty, and that would be of service to children who want to read books on family diversity as well.
Second, after the children's books were utilized in class, there was a great decrease in the number of children who didn't want to mingle with children from multicultural families or who disliked them. The children who took the lessons got more willing to be on good terms and make friends with them. When their responses were checked in detail, it's found that they decided not to dislike or tease those children any more though their appearance was different from theirs and looked strange. They increasingly viewed them as Korean despite the differences in looks. Third, when education about divorced families was conducted by employing the children's books, it produced good effects. The children who were biased against divorced families and just considered intact families normal got to see divorced families and children whose parents were divorced in a new light. Many still felt sorry about those children and found them to be sad or miss their parents, but they increasingly decided not to make fun of their family background. Instead, they got willing to mingle and sympathize with them, and there was a lot of reduction in the number of children who considered single-parent families to malfunction. They determined to approve of children from those families as they were and to get closer to them.
Fourth, when education about remarried families was provided by capitalizing on the children's books, it turned out effective as well. In a pretest, they believed that children whose parents were remarried would be persecuted or hated by stepfathers or mothers for no reason, but there was a significant change in their prejudice. They came to receive remarried families as they were without seeing them as extraordinary any more, which was an ideal phenomenon.
The attempts to draw up lists of children's books related to family diversity by theme and degree of difficulty and offer education by utilizing the selected books was effective at modifying children's way of looking at family diversity and their attitude toward diverse forms of families. In the future, extensive research efforts should be directed into providing different graders with education about family diversity and multiple forms of families by applying children's books