Abstract
This study aims to foster social acceptance of immigrant children among native students and teachers, and to prevent social exclusion of minorities. These issues are extremely salient and relevant in the Finnish context, where 98% of teachers report that they have intervened to deal with episodes of discrimination, but only 44% of students thought that teachers’ promptly and effectively acted in response to bullying and social exclusion. We will evaluate the impact of workshops intended to reduce social exclusion run by a local NGO (Walter), implemented in a sample of 92 elementary schools in Finland over a three year period. Walter will run two types of workshops. The first one will target students directly in order to promote inter-group interactions in the classroom. The second workshop will be centered on training native teachers by sharing with them the tools to foster communication and reduce discrimination in their classroom. The common goal of the interventions is to foster social acceptance of immigrant children among native students and teachers, and prevent social exclusion. We will evaluate the effects of these workshops together and separately. To maximize power, we will first evaluate the effects of both treatments (with treatment status pooled). Next, to understand whether teacher centered workshops are substitutes for student centered workshops, we will compare the magnitudes of the effects from both treatment branches.