Practice what you preach: The moderating role of teacher attitudes on the relationship between prejudice reduction and student engagement. (November 2019) - Abacioglu, Ceren S.
Abstract: The current study examined the relationship between teachers' prejudice reduction practices, focusing on dialogue about issues around diversity, and their students' engagement. We additionally investigated the potential moderation of this relationship by teachers' explicit multicultural attitudes and implicit attitudes towards ethnic minorities. Our multilevel models using 35 primary school teachers and 711 students showed that for teachers who reported above-average multicultural attitudes, prejudice reduction was positively associated with student engagement. Our results suggest that these teachers might not only promote multiculturalism as an abstract ideal, but they actually "walk the talk" and hence can improve educational lives of their students. Highlights: Using multilevel models, we examined the relationship between teachers' prejudice reduction practices and students' engagement. Prejudice reduction practices focused on engaging in dialogue about diversity and confronting intergroup bias. Teachers' explicit multicultural attitudes and implicit attitudes towards ethnic minorities were possible moderators. Prejudice reduction predicted increases in student engagement for teachers with above-average positive explicit attitudes. Our models did not support such an interaction effect for implicit ethnic attitudes.