Preventing the social exclusion of immigrants

Treatment 1: Walter’s Kytke Program for Students
Walter has been running workshops with children (Walter’s KYTKE project) every year since 2012. The first component of the intervention is a workshop aimed at promoting multiculturalism, raising intercultural interactions, and enhancing feeling of empathy and respect for others. Each meeting (schools visit schools twice) is attended by around 25 students at a time and run by 8-10 current or former Finnish professional athletes and artists with diverse ethnic backgrounds. The goal of these 60-minutes meetings is to increase intercultural interaction and enhance empathy and respect for others. The main components of the treatment are the following:
• Introduction: presenters introduce themselves and describe some concepts related to being Finnish, multicultural societiesity, the notion of identity, discrimination, and racism;
• Short videos: students are shownwatch one short video based on a true story. The video-material developed by Walter for this intervention is available at the following links: (1)  vimeo.com/waltervideo/muuri (2) vimeo.com/waltervideo/20-20 (3) vimeo.com/waltervideo/aurinko (4) vimeo.com/waltervideo/maakallis (password: kytk3).
• Group work: students work in small groups to discuss these issues more in depth. Presenters join these groups and help guide the discussions. Students are asked to bring forward their own experiences, feelings, and thoughts. Presenters tell stories from their own lives, which encourage the students to do the same.
• Conversation together with Walter members: groups share what they’ve they have been working on.

Treatment 2: Walter’s CulturED Program for Teachers
CulturED is a workshop for teachers implemented by the same group as the Kytke workshops. Teachers are offered to attend two sessions. The goal of the project is twofold. First, teachers are (both implicitly and explicitly) challenged to question their own stereotypes and prejudices, and are induced to appreciate the value of diversity. Second, CulturED aims at building teachers’ capacity at working with diverse student populations and at developing tools to overcome challenges posed by the multicultural classroom environments they work in every day.
The intervention entails Aa pair of two-hour workshops focuses focused on four topics: 1) stereotypes, 2) marginalization, 3) racism, and 4) Finnish identity. It The workshop encourages teachers to be open, brave, and honest. The structure is similar to students’ workshops described above. For each theme, the following activities are built and carried out during the workshop:
• Data: Presentation of data and statistics on the theme with reference to the Finnish context.
• Short-film: A custom-made short film based on a true story is shown to teachers (same videos as shown to children in Kytke workshops).
• Group-work: teachers work in small groups to engage with these issues in more depth under the guidance of presenters from Walter. Teachers are asked to bring forward their own experiences, feelings and thoughts. Presenters tell stories from their own lives, and encourage the teachers to do the same.
• Conversation together with Walter members: groups share what they’ve been working on.
Throughout, Walter aims to create as open and inclusive an atmosphere as possible. Finally, CulturED provides teacher with the material they should use in the classroom to open and manage a discussion with their students on these themes. The material includes the short videos used for the CulturED intervention (see links above) and a booklet created by Walter that has discussion guidelines for the teacher. For each movie, the discussion points are structured in three categories: (a) discussions before watching the movie about the topic, (b) discussion after the movie about the movie itself, (c) discussion about the topic of the movie but personal experiences. Teachers will also obtain tips during the workshop to prevent limit the use of their stereotypes while communicating with their students.

2021-10-04

2024-03-31

Decreased discrimination and bullying, increased minority-majority friendships, and improved grades - particularly for students from immigrant backgrounds.

Implicit and explicit bias. Follow up studies will look at register-data outcomes for educational choice, grades, and school transitions. We also hope to conduct a follow up survey during middle school to measure persistent effects of bias reduction, and integrated social networks.

We are running an RCT targeting 5th grade students in 92 schools over a three year period. Each year, 3 classes in 15 schools are offered student workshops to promote multiculturalism, and all 5th grade teachers. These workshops are offered by Walter ry to the schools. In the summer of 2021, we randomized the set of schools which receive treatment; given that the number of classes in each grade in each school fluctuates from year to year, class-level randomization takes place annually.

Randomization took place on a computer. First, we ran 20,000 randomizations, checking for balance on school-level variables. Second, we kept the top 2,001 randomization vectors in terms of balance. Finally, we selected one randomization vector at random from this set for treatment. This will allow us to supplement our traditional analysis with a set of 2,000 pre-specified randomization vectors for randomization inference.

School by year, by classroom.

Yes

Roughly 270 school by year units.

Roughly 20,000 students.

Over the three year period, 45 schools (by year) will be offered student centered workshops, while 60 schools (by year) will be offered teacher workshops. Another 141 schools (by year) will remain untreated.

Our power calculations suggest that the minimum detectable effect will be about 0.05 standard deviations for both native students as well as those from an immigrant background.