Children's moral judgements about inclusion and exclusion in play

It is important to investigate how children engage in moral reasoning in order to understand the nature of inclusion and exclusion of others. The capacity to reason about a range of positive and negative attributes of others while ignoring stereotypes is reflected in an individual's epistemic beliefs (beliefs about knowledge and knowing). However, little is known about children's epistemic beliefs and how these relate to moral reasoning. Drawing on social-domain theory (Killen, 2007) which recognises that children engage in different types of reasoning across moral, social-conventional and psychological domains, this study investigates the reasoning and epistemic beliefs of 31 children (5-6 years). The children's teachers (n=3) were also interviewed to investigate their pedagogies for moral reasoning. A vignette about two disagreeing puppets, based on Wainryb et al's (2004) methodologies to assess epistemic beliefs, was presented to children. When children were introduced to the puppets, one who expressed the same belief as the child and the other who held a conflicting belief, most children indicated that only one belief could be right (n=28) suggesting children held objectivist epistemic beliefs (knowledge is certain). Children were asked if it was okay for one puppet to hold a belief that was different from their own view (tolerance of others' views). Of the 27 children who thought that there was only one right answer, 21 children indicated it was acceptable for the two protagonist puppets to believe different things (subjectivist epistemology). Children were also presented with scenarios which investigated moral reasoning. When children were asked about including a child of a different ethnicity or a child who bullies, in their play, the majority of children (n=26) believed that children of different ethnicity should be included but were they were less likely to include a child who bullied (n=23). Children's justifications, scored using the psychological, social-conventional and moral domains, were related to fairness and moral concerns. Analysis of the semi-structured teacher interviews showed that teachers focused on the need for children to reason about and take responsibility for their actions in their teaching practices. These data show that children's epistemic beliefs are objectivist in nature when it comes to moral values but subjectivist epistemologies were evident when children acknowledged the right for others to hold diverse opinions. Objectivist beliefs were evident when they resorted to reasoning that relied on a single right answer. Implications are discussed with a focus on understanding contextual influences on children's moral reasoning and how children come to value diverse perspectives.