A UBC Innovation Snapshot: Be inspired by and connect with innovators at UBC
Who are you?
Amori Mikami: I’m a clinical psychologist and associate professor in the department of psychology at UBC. My work focuses on ways in which a supportive classroom or home environment can help children to make friends. I have a special interest in designing and evaluating interventions that train teachers or parents in strategies to assist children with peer problems.
My innovation is an intervention that I have developed to help children’s peers become more socially inclusive and tolerant to children with mental health and learning disorders. The intervention program is called MOSAIC (Making Socially Accepting Inclusive Classrooms). I see this, in part, as flipping the target of intervention as compared to what has been done traditionally; this is what makes my intervention approach novel.
What problem are you solving?
Children with mental disorders are often disliked, excluded, and mistrusted by their peers. Classmates don’t want to work or play with them. Classmates’ negative reactions can be persistent, severe, and compounded over years. This can lead to children with mental disorders feeling very negatively about school and about themselves. What is important to know is that most psychologists try to tackle this problem by providing interventions (medication or psychosocial) to the children with mental disorders: trying to teach them to reduce their negative symptoms; and to behave more pro-socially with peers. The assumption is that peers will notice these behavioural changes in children with mental disorders, and will naturally respond by liking these children. While this approach is useful, I argue that it is incomplete because it fails to address the peer group that has chosen to stigmatize and exclude children with mental disorders in the first place.
How does your idea contribute to society?
Helping young children be more open minded, inclusive, and socially accepting to peers with mental health and learning challenges. Many teachers are not sure what to do when they see their students reject or exclude children who are different. They may try speaking to the class about it but wonder how much the message is getting through. MOSAIC is more than a teacher saying to the class “we have to be nice to others who are different”. The underlying principle of MOSAIC is that the way teachers talk with children who have mental disorders in their small, day-to-day interactions (in academic tasks, when handling disciplinary infractions) sends the most powerful message to observing peers about how peers should judge these same children. The project is training lower mainland teachers in the MOSAIC curriculum — and evaluating the effects on children’s social bonds in the classroom and, eventually, on their academic learning.
What do you need now?
I am seeking more teachers (of grades K-4) in Burnaby and Coquitlam who are willing to try MOSAIC and allow us to evaluate this approach in their classroom in the 2018-2019 academic year.