"We do not have inclusion strategy in our school as all kids are ours!" Making injustice invisible in Slovak education.

Author(s):

Zuzana Kusá(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

07 SES 10 B, Gender Stereotypes, Sexual Harassment and Discrimination

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-24

15:30-17:00

Room:

W3.17

Chair:

Sandra Girbés-Peco

Contribution

Representative opinion surveys suggest that the redistributive concept of social justice has been losing ground in Slovakia in the last decades. The share of population believing that decent living conditions should be warranted for all has decreased sharply. Solidarity with the most deprived Slovak Roma population seems to be almost replaced by moral exclusion (Opotow 1990) and calls for a tough hand. In the situation of solidarity twighlight we could only believe with the classic that the school might be the place of collective learning of desire for justice, solidarity and empathy with week and suffering (Durkheim 1973). Paper examines the possibility of Slovak schools to be a place of recovery of solidarity and development of inclusive atmosphere by studying elementary school teachers' understanding of equality and justice, their interventions (and non-interventions) to support more inclusive relations among children and the organisational and policy conditions od Slovak education.

Method

Paper is based on the set of in-depth interviews with teachers collected in the 7thFP project EDUMIGROM (2008-2011) and in the research project Social Inclusion in School from the perspective of Sociology of Everyday Life (2013-2016) that also comprised the study of the policy and organisational documents and school ethnography in 15 classes of the six grade of standard elementary schools that were also attended by children with special educational needs and Roma children. Ethnography of daily life of class lasted 80 days in total and also covered breaks and playtime to observe spontaneous interactions among pupils.Etnographic Observation was added by interviews with teachers and conversations with pupils (initiated by them). The analysis of ethnographic records and legislative and organisational documents was done by ATLAS.ti and framed by the Grounded Theory Approach. The leading principle of GTA - Constant Comparative Method – was guiding the comparative work with all the data illuminating the processes of social inclusion and exclusion in schools under study.

Expected Outcomes

There are several structural and cultural barriers for Slovak schools to become the place of recovery of the desire for justice and solidarity: free choice of schools, selectivity and early tracking that isolate children from different social background and prevent their interaction. Moreover, teachers's opinions seem to be massively infused by the meritocratic concept of justice and their views that the equalisation measures targeted to most deprived (Roma) children are the injustice to other chiildren.doubt the chance they would ever act as rescuers of solidarity in the country.

References

DURKHEIM, Émile. 1973. On Morality and Society. Edited and with an Introduction by Robert N. Bellah. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. GOFFMAN, Erving, 1972. Encounters. Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Allan Lane The Penguin Books. OPOTOW, Susan. 1990. Moral exclusion and injustice [Special issue]. Journal of Social Issues, 46(1), 1 – 20. SLEE, Roger & Julie ALLAN, 2001. Excluding the included: A reconsideration of inclusive education, International Studies in Sociology of Education 11 (2), 173-192, DOI:10.1080/09620210100200073 SLEE, Roger, 2013. How do we make inclusive education happen when exclusion is a political predisposition?, International Journal of Inclusive Education 17 (8), 895-907, DOI: 10.1080/13603116.2011.602534

Author Information

Zuzana Kusá (presenting / submitting)

Institute for Sociology Slovak Academy of Sciences

Bratislava

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