Session Information
Contribution
This joint presentation is the result of Francesca Gobbo’s involvement into anthropology and ethnography of education, and the follow up of a European Project that is presently carried out by a team of four students (three graduating at the Master level and one at the doctorate level) coordinated by Gobbo.
As I noticed in a forthcoming chapter, “cultural anthropologists studying Roma, Sinti and Camminanti have repeatedly been concerned with those children’s experiences of schooling. Their ethnographic research provides educators and teachers with fine theoretical interpretations of the classroom vicissitudes of these minority children, of teachers' expectations and representations of them, and of the cultures of schools. The ethnographies delve into the children's strategies of learning (Gomes 2003, Pontrandolfo 2004), of identity preservation - interpreted as resistance to schooling - or into the processes of fragmented participation in classroom activities, differentiated learning and dilemmas of adult literacy projects (Gomes 1998, Saletti Salza 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, Trevisan 2005, among others). Anthropologist Leonardo Piasere has conducted and coordinated anthropological and historical research on the various Roma groups that is relevant to those engaged in achieving equity in education” (Gobbo 2010).
The European Project INSETRom (IN-Service Training for Roma Inclusion) aimed to positively respond to the continued failure of education systems to improve the situation and to the challenge that such negative situation represents for teachers, Roma families and children, who, together with their “culture” are to often blamed for being a “problem”. Therefore, the anthropologists’ “findings and interpretations were used for the INSETRom project because of their relevance for teachers or academic educators concerned with social justice in education. They furthermore provide a fruitful opportunity – when complemented by historical research – to reflect on the role and aims of Roma education and re-education in modern and contemporary times when educational plans disguised policies of violent assimilation of those disquieting and unacceptable nomads” (Gobbo 2009a, 2009b, 2010, Gobbo, Peano 2009).
The four student researchers’ plan to do participant observation in different classrooms in order to understand the everyday educational routines and relations, and the effects on them of INSETRom training course is seen as an instance of “team research” (Woods 2003) that is already providing interesting findings on the dialectical tension between schooling and enculturation, between teachers’ self-fulfilling “prophecies” and pupils’ strategies of accommodation and agency, between teachers’ positive educational initiatives and a complex institutional and cultural context reluctant to change its ways.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
1. Gobbo F. (2009a), “<
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