The educational opportunities that lie in self-directed age mixing among children and adolescents
Jay Feldman, Boston College

Date: 1997

Abstract

The goal of this dissertation is to describe qualitatively the kinds of age-mixed interactions that occurred among children in an age-mixed setting and to generate ideas concerning the nature and potential educational functions of such interactions. The study was based on three years of observations of children, aged 4-19, enrolled at the Sudbury Valley School (SVS). The special significance of SVS for this study is that it is an age-mixed environment in which children are free to choose their own partners and activities, and in which children have ample same- and cross-age partners from whom to choose. Through the qualitative analysis of 375 vignettes of children's age-mixed interactions, three themes were derived which addressed separate potential functions of children's age-mixed interactions. First, children appeared to use age-mixed interactions to develop skills and gain knowledge. Four main findings were derived from observations of children's explicit and implicit helping interactions: (a) when younger children asked older participants for help, the help was usually given, (b) when older children offered unsolicited help, the help was typically rejected, (c) help was more welcome from participants than from spectators, and (d) children modified their behavior in mutual activities to include younger children while also making the activity challenging to themselves. Second, age-mixed interactions appeared to help children develop a sense of responsibility for others. Four main findings were derived from examining instances where children acted responsibly or irresponsibly toward younger children: (a) they responded positively to younger children's requests for help, (b) they more often praised and supported than discouraged or hurtfully teased younger children, (c) they talked to each other about how to treat younger children, and (d) there were few instances of them bullying younger ones. Third, children developed friendships with mixed-age partners. Two types of friendships were observed and are discussed in terms of their potential functions to both older and younger partners: (a) some children regularly associated with older or younger friends and companions and (b) some children had a special cross-age friend despite regularly associating with same-age partners.

Subject Area