One of the main objectives of the 2020 strategy is to fight against discrimination in the classroom and school dropout, especially of ethnic minorities like roma students, and more specifically roma women, who reach dramatic percentages where illiteracy rates exceed 70%. However, improving the educational levels of the roma community and other segregated groups does not only involve to enhance their training and the development of their educational skills, but also to end the bullying and harassment they are subject to, which usually leads them to school absenteeism, discouragement, and ultimately to abandoning their studies and the school.
In recent years, recent studies show that the levels of harassment suffered by roma students have increased significantly, and that this increase is directly related to the increase in hate speech and far-right political movements that permeating high school classrooms especially. It is also important to bear in mind that, after the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be essential for all countries to work together to strengthen their educational systems by promoting more inclusive schools, since the future of next generations depends on it.
We must look after the groups on which this crisis had the greatest impact, who were already in a situation of economic precariousness, and roma students and others who, due to their social, cultural, and economic obstacles, have been more strongly impacted. As such, it is essential that schools have the adequate resources to work on inclusion in the classroom, to stop bullying, and prevent the school failure and leaving of these students who already start at a point of great educational disadvantage.
One of the problems when combatting this harassment and hatred while adapting the learning processes to these groups lies in the detection of segregation in the classroom and the fallacious hate speech it uses to discriminate. In order to effectively lower the dropout rate of the roma community, students and teachers require not only innovative educational resources, but also innovative tools to detect harassment and hate speech in the classroom.
This is why we have created the VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT FOR THE DETECTION OF HARASSMENT AND HATE SPEECH IN THE CLASSROOM (R1); a tool to detect racism and hate speech, and the early shapes they take, through anonymous surveys to students through their smartphones and/or PC.
Our other main objective is to train secondary school teachers themselves in pedagogical methods and educational practices aimed at boosting inclusion in the classroom and the educational success of roma students, for which we will create the OERs: KITS AGAINST DISCRIMINATION (O2).
The third result is a EXPLANATORY GUIDE OF THE ANALYSIS OF THE LEVEL OF INCIDENCE OF HATE SPEECH IN THE CLASSROOM (R2). This guide lays the theoretical, educational, and mathematical basis for defining the algorithm that R1 uses to generate the report for the analysis of the incidence of Hate Speech in the classroom.
The fourth major result of our project is a DIDACTIC PROGRAM (R3), aimed at teachers in the field of school education for levels between 12 and 16 years old from all over Europe (equivalent in Spain to secondary school), so they are trained to achieve an inclusive classroom where roma students can overcome their barriers and achieve educational success, and to learn specific strategies to remove hate speech from their classrooms.
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