Helping my Romani pupils also when they do not need it. A research on teachers' benevolent overhelping

This paper aims at observing how social inequalities among primary school pupils may be either reproduced or challenged by teachers' helping. A recently renewed tradition of observational studies convincingly showed how school routines may risk confirming the existing power inequalities among students. It overtly conflicts with declarations of the Italian Constitution, that school's responsibility is to remove all impairments opposing a full development of students' capabilities. Among the many facets of teacherpupil relation, our research focuses on the primary school teachers' helping, assuming that, if teachers help pupils belonging to socially stigmatized groups even beyond their actual needs, their benevolent over-helping will implicitly signal to these children that they hold poor expectations from them. Theoretically, this idea is rooted in two research traditions. First, in his classic works Vygotsky described how children' development originates from their social interactions, when capable others help children to solve those problems that they cannot cope with autonomously, yet can successfully face when cooperating. Second, since the end of Seventies social psychologists have showed how helping strategies may either reinforce receivers' autonomy or lead them to become dependent from donors. More in particular, dependency-oriented help was proved to be used for those who are socially disadvantaged, to help them «to stay where they are» (Nadler and Chernyak-Hai, 2014), i.e. at the bottom of the social ladder. Merging these two influential research traditions, we tested the hypothesis that in primary school children of socially stigmatized groups could be helped by their teachers also for problems they can easily solve by themselves. To provide empirical evidence of this phenomenon's occurrence, and to enable teachers to perceive it, an original methodology was set in place. In a game simulation setting, dyads composed by one teacher and his/her pupil (aged 8-10 years, either belonging to the ethnic majority or to a Romani group) were invited to play a two steps game, where the child was asked to face a task of growing complexity and the teacher had to side with their pupil. Data show that when the task is complex, siding strategies chosen by teachers are the same for children belonging both to the ethnic majority and to Romani families. On the contrary, when the task is easy enough to be autonomously solved by the child, children issued from Romani families were more frequently helped beyond their actual need by their teachers. Finally, teachers received a video-feedback of their helping behavior, designed to increase their self-awareness about this bias towards disadvantaged children and to discuss with researchers on detrimental effects of benevolent over-helping. Observations during the video-feedback allowed to understand that oftentimes teachers were unaware of their over-helping towards Romani children, and more in general were not familiar with the concept of negative effects of over-helping.