SBO project with a primary societal finality: Social well-being in Flemish primary schools

School bullying is one of the prime causes of mental health issues, learning difficulties and developmental problems among children and adolescents. One particularly harmful form of bullying behavior is ‘identity-based bullying’ (IBB) in which victims are exposed to sustained verbal or physical aggression, discrimination or social exclusion on the basis of such characteristics as their gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background or physical ability. Indeed, against the widespread view of the ‘innocent child’, research shows that children internalize stereotypical conceptions of their peers as early as preschool and that such conceptions often translate into subtle or explicit forms of bullying. As children grow up in increasingly diverse societies, the challenges of learning to cope with diversity also increase, especially within the school context. Curiously however, the bulk of current policies designed to tackle IBB remain targeted at adolescents and are often informed by research that focuses almost exclusively on teenagers. Much less attention is devoted to the role that prejudice plays in the early onset of school bullying in preschools and primary schools. One of the reasons for this relative neglect is that established methods for studying bullying behavior in schools (e.g. questionnaires, interviews) are not very wellsuited for research with young children. As a result, there is a sizeable gap in our understanding of the prevalence of IBB in Flemish (pre-)primary schools. This interdisciplinary SBO project aims to address this gap by developing a novel set of methodologies that will aim to explain 1) how prejudice gives rise to bullying on the playground, 2) how prejudice shapes classroom interactions, 3) when specific forms of prejudice emerge in children’s social and cognitive development and, finally, determine the role that 4) teachers and 5) teaching materials play in managing and preventing IBB in Flemish (pre-)primary schools.