| This study focuses on racial and ethnic categories used by three to five-year-old children in group discussions with their teachers in Greek kindergartens. Children of different ethnic and racial backgrounds in the data appear to categorize the “other” with reference to familiar aspects of their own culture, thereby constructing imagined “otherness” in contrast to generalized categories of “us”. The former (e.g. “the Japanese”) appear to be linked with deficit category bound activities (”they don’t know how to eat like we do”) and an overarching morality of “us”. This research builds on previous work on Membership Categorization Analysis of race and ethnicity (Day 1998, Hester & Housley 2002, Koole & Hanson 2002, Leudar, Marsland & Nekvapil 2004, Zimmerman 2007), and further employs Conversation Analysis to discuss the appearance of CBAs at particular sequential points and their subsequent treatment by teachers: children’s CBAs appear in the middle of rather simplistic depictions of other cultures while teachers’ responses do not distance themselves from caricatured otherness. Analysis is followed by discussion of the problems of category work in multicultural education and of the nature of “common sense” knowledge packed into children’s categories of race and ethnicity. |
