EDUCATING THE EXCLUDED
Project duration: 09/2016 – 10/2017
The need
The partnership project proposal between Charlie Karlin & ETP Slovakia is a follow-up to the previous long term cooperation and it seeks to address Czech & Slovakia’s serious and intractable social problem – the plight of socially excluded Roma children who were born and live in segregated, ghettos. Disturbingly, few Roma children complete their primary education and even fewer continue to secondary school. During their school years these children have to battle with their underdeveloped cognitive functions that are crucial for acquiring all the basic skills, such as reading, writing, and mathematics. Our extensive experience has demonstrated that the combination of insufficient family involvement in upbringing and inadequate living conditions require a radically different teaching approach if Roma children are to thrive. The current education systems in the Czech Republic and Slovakia are, however, ill prepared to respond to the needs of such children.
Our Approach
The intention of this project is to reduce disparities in learning outcomes affecting disadvantaged learners through more effective teaching methods, to foster the exchange of diverse and extensive experience and its utilization in different communities and localities, to demonstrate that disadvantaged learners can be integrated into society when national curricula of mainstream schooling are complemented by innovative approaches, such as mediated learning experience (MLE), seeking to correct deficiencies of disadvantaged learners in an appropriate manner.
The expected outcomes are:
- More pupils exposed to mediated learning experience and their increased intrinsic motivation, improved thinking skills, better self-regulation, growing willingness to going to school, experience of success
- Competent and international network of professionals working together
- Evidence giving material to be used widely to promote alternative approaches to work with Romani pupils