Turning Difficulties Into Opportunities: Learning Communities and Successful Educational Actions With Roma Children

• In Event: 68.040 - SALEACOM Network: Sharing Global Knowledge to Improve Learning for the Most Disadvantaged Youth

Abstract

Objectives
To study the impact of Successful Educational Actions (SEA), implemented in Schools as Learning Communities, especially in Roma students’ achievement.

Theoretical Framework
The Roma, an ethnic minority of Indian origin who have spread out all around the globe, are one of the first people to live beyond the states’ boundaries, and who claim the existence of a common cultural identity and a shared history (Sordé, Flecha & Alexiu, 2013). Still, they suffer from segregation in schools, poor quality housing and high unemployment rates, among others (Bello, 2009). Particularly, Roma students are over concentrated in lower achieving classes as well as their curriculums are being tailored (Lucas & Berends, 2002). As a consequence, students in those tracks show higher dropout levels and have more difficulties in accessing to higher education (Schofield, Alexander, Bangs & Schauenburg, 2006). Aiming at reducing existing inequalities, schools as Learning Communities aim to ensure high quality learning for all children, by involving the whole community through egalitarian dialogue. This paper explores the impact of this community school-based model in one of the highest marginalized Roma community in Spain. Particularly we explore the implementation of Successful Educational Actions (SEA) grounded in dialogic learning, which are not isolated practices but actions that have shown to improve children’s attainment and social cohesion in many diverse contexts (Flecha & Soler, 2013).

Methods
The analysis of the implementation of SEAs has followed a mixed methods design with communicative approach (Gómez, 2014). A four-year longitudinal case study was conducted at La Paz school. Each year the qualitative study involved 13
communicative life stories with family members, one communicative focus group
with professionals working in the school, five communicative observations and 13
open-ended interviews with professionals and representatives from the administration
and from community organizations.

Results
The implementation of SEAs that included the participation of families and communities have been shown to have a positive impact on children’s attainment and social transformation. Two actions emerged as crucial for enhancing Roma children’s learning: (a) interactive groups and (b) dialogic literary gatherings (Flecha et al., 2015). Both actions accelerate literacy and numeracy skills, mainly thanks to parents’ continuous involvement in educational activities inside the school. The school opens all their spaces to family members creating the space for including their voice and dreams. This increased family participation in the school. Consequently, “the children are much more encouraged to learn. They take books home to read, because they are already reading with their father or mother” (Flecha & Soler, 2013, p. 460).

Scientific significance
This symposium will present findings from the only Social Sciences research funded by the European Commission which has been selected as one of the ten success stories of research in Europe (European Commission, 2011). These findings illustrate high levels of social, political and scientific impact. Details of this social impact has been collected in SIOR, the first digital repository that displays the social impact of research results (http://www.ub.edu/sior/view.php?id=1).

Authors

• Rocio Garcia-Carrion, University of Deusto

• Oriol Rios, Universitat Rovira i Virgili

• Carme Garcia Yeste, Universitat Rovira i Virgili