Teachers’ perceptions, attitudes and feelings towards pupils of Roma origin

Roma Parents' Perceptions on Education

“…How do they value education, how do they judge school system? and racist attitudes, displacements, movements and persecutions, low pay and work status) (Zachos, 2006(Zachos, , 2007(Zachos, , 2011(Zachos, , 2012(Zachos, , 2014(Zachos, , 2017a. Although Roma groups do not have a strong collective political representation, over the last thirty years they have attracted the interest of international organizations and associations such as the United Nations and the European Union.…”

“…This focus on issues of identity and culture actually works against the aim of uncovering the true causes of educational failure by students of Roma origins which in our opinion are poverty, social exclusion and marginalization. As we have repeatedly emphasized (Zachos, 2007(Zachos, , 2014(Zachos, , 2017a(Zachos, , 2017b, the financial problems most Roma face, as well as their group's low social status are the main obstacles to students of Roma origin's efforts to integrate in schools and achieve success at the same rate as the Gadje (non-Roma).…”

“…State controlled curricula ignore Roma history, accomplishments, everyday activities and culture (Zachos, 2017b). Schools are not well prepared to work with students of Roma origins, while (some) teachers do not have sufficient knowledge and understanding of Roma group distinctiveness and sometimes they forced to improvise to help Roma origins students (Zachos, 2017a).…”

Inclusion of Roma students in Europe

“…First, the Norwegian anthropologist F. Barth, in an early influential work in 1969, argued against the "static objectivism" (Brubaker, 2009, p. 29 [4]) that was then prevailing in social studies on the concept of ethnicity. Nearly two decades later, the German pioneer of sociology Max Weber, extended this approach to the Western European intellectual sphere by defining ethnic groups "as socially constructed and ethnicity as contextual, situational performative and fluid" (Surdu and Kovats, 2015, p. 7 [12]). Though his rich contribution to the definition of the notion was relatively long ignored, he was among the first ones to de-essentialise the concept of ethnicity by challenging frozen presupposed boundaries between different racial or ethnic groups (Brubaker, 2009[4]; Zoïa, 2012[6]).…”

Roma, Curriculum, and Textbooks: The Case of Greece

“…The present paper belongs to a series of studies by the author (Zachos, 2007;2011a;2011b;2012;2014;2017;Zachos & Panagiotidou, 2016) which attempt to examine the relationship of Roma groups living in Greece to the national education system. More specifically, the present study examines the way in which Roma groups are presented in the official curriculum and textbooks used in Greek primary education.…”