What Teachers Tell Students About Ethnicity

The ethnic socialization is very important for teenagers in minority areas.The current researches mainly focus on the parental socialization or peer's socialization,few studies consider the environment outside the family.The school is also the main place for the transfer of ethnic socialization,and teachers are important person to teach the information of the ethnic socialization to the youth.In this study,teacher's ethnic socialization is defined as the process that teachers transmit information about ethnic characteristics and how to deal with ethnic relations in school to students.To young students in Yunnan Province in border minority areas as the research object,we develop the teacher's ethnic socialization questionnaire,and investigate the ethnic socialization information types in school,and the relationship between teachers' ethnic socialization information and ethnic identity.In study 1,we used the open questionnaire to explore the characteristics of different types of teacher's socialization,in order to develop the dimensional structure of the scale of teachers' socialization,provide references for study 2.Using reports from 3 schools(355students),it turns out that the students report that teachers tell them about ethnic socialization information are promote to harmony,cultural socialization,inherit tradition,encourage to ignore,concern for learning,ethnic policy,bias preparation,report to authority.In study 2,we developed an teacher's ethnic socialization questionnaire to explore 2000 students from Dehong,Wenshan,Chuxiong,Xishuangbanna,Dali and other places in Yunnan,and there 1787 valid questionnaires.Divide the data into two halves and do the factor analyze.Results showed that teacher's ethnic socialization factors are ethnic character and event,custom and belief,bias preparation,promote the development of his or her ethnic groups,promote to harmony,report to authority,encourage to ignore,concern for learning,ethnic policy,inherit tradition,prejudicediscrimination.After we do the confirmatory factor analysis,it turns out that 11 factors belong to the questionnaire of teacher's ethnic socialization,the fitting index reaches the prerequisites of psychological measurement.Score of each dimension of teachers' ethnic socialization are significantly correlated with the total scale,the correlation coefficient is 0.673 to 0.726.In study 3,teacher's ethnic socialization questionnaire,ethnic identity questionnaire were used to research the relation among teacher's ethnic socialization,ethnic identity of 1787 adolescents.The results show that:(1)Male and female students have significant differences in the five dimensions of promoting harmony,caring learning,ethnic policy,inheritance tradition and prejudice discrimination.(2)There is no significant difference between the three grades in reporting authority,but the difference is significant in the other ten factors.(3)Regression analysis shows that the explanatory power of ethnic character and event,custom and belief,bias preparation,promote the development of his or her ethnic groups,promote to harmony,report to authority,encourage to ignore,concern for learning,ethnic policy,inherit tradition,prejudice discrimination to ethnic identity is 35.2%,the higher score of promote to harmony,the score of ethnic identity will be higher.However,results of regression analysis of the three factors of bias preparation,reporting authority and encourage to ignore to the ethnic identity is not significant.The results show that three kinds of information transmitted by teachers to students do not increase students' sense of ethnic identity.To sum up,the study obtains several conclusions:(1)The scale of teachers' ethnic socialization is available to explore what teachers tell the students about ethnic.(2)What teacher tell the students about ethnic socialization contains 11 dimensions,ethnic character and event,custom and belief,bias preparation,promote the development of his or her ethnic groups,promote to harmony,report to authority,encourage to ignore,concern for learning,ethnic policy,inherit tradition,prejudice discrimination.(3)Most of the ethnic socialization information transmitted by teachers tostudents is positively related to students' ethnic identity.Promoting the development of his or her ethnic groups and inheritance of their nationalities has the highest prediction rate for students' ethnic identity.