Hello, my name is Mina, I'm a researcher at Gritim, and today we have the dialogue on immigration and education, how to distinguish problems from challenges. So our speakers today are two great experts, Miguel Ángeles Somba and Xenia Helgren. Miguel Ángeles Somba is a doctor in Pedagogy from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and he's an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Pedagogy and Director of the Chair on Community Education at Autonomous University of Barcelona. He also leads the research group on diversity and inclusion in complex societies. He has also developed an intense political and social activity, such as the direction of the UNESCO Center of Catalonia, the direction of the Serious Network of the European Commission on Education and Immigration Policies, and he was the Commissioner of Education of the Barcelona City Council. And Xenia Helgren is a Doctor of Sociology and Senior Researcher at Gritim. Currently, she's a Marica Researcher Fellow, and her main research areas involve inclusion and exclusion, precarity and agency of immigrants and racialized groups in European societies, with a particular focus on discrimination. She has engaged with inequalities in the education system as leader of two EU-funded research projects, one of them being Roma Inclusion in Education, fostering constructive attitudes and good practices in the Barcelona area, and the other one being RepCAD, the role of the ethnic majority in integration processes, attitudes and practices towards immigrants in the Catalan institutions. So we can start with the presentation, with Miguel's work. Thanks very much, thanks Mina, thanks Xenia for sharing this roundtable, and thank you as well to Rekard Zapata, dear colleague and friend for this kind invitation to be here with you among us. As Mina was already announcing, I'd like to start my presentation by introducing the key framework where I have been working in the field of research on education and migration. And this framework refers, thank you, to a network that you can easily find on the website or on the web, which is the Sidious Network. This is a network that was established initially in Barcelona, by the way, at the beginning of 2012, and this network was an initiative by the Commission, by the European Commission, in order to promote an interdisciplinary task force where different kind of stakeholders, I mean decision makers, policy makers, policy implementers, civil society leaders, professionals, trade unions, ministries of education, come together in the same place and discuss, analyze and find out conclusions in order to explore which are the improvements we may introduce in European education systems concerning education and migration. Just have a look at it and you will see what is the frame where I come from and the research I've been producing for years in recent times. Let me just point out that this network aims to become a kind of reference for the EU in terms of education and migration. We've got a vision. Our vision is that universal right to education is fully implemented to all students, to everyone, irrespective their origin or other individual features, and the mission is to create opportunities for meeting, for gathering, for working together among all these stakeholders I already mentioned before. So we particularly strive for the universal right to education for all without any the kind of discrimination, to increase the high quality of public education services, to promote better education, better school integration, to advocate for the reduction of segregation and early school living, to have the major goals for an European policy based on education, and finally, the development of curricula which integrate issues concerning cultural diversity, but also linguistic and religious ones. The objectives that we follow is to fit these best evidences and practices. That is why we do research in an international atmosphere. We also analyze and co-create knowledge with policymakers. So this is not only a network restricted to people that are working in the field of knowledge, but also in the field of practice, no matter the practices, political or professional, together with students, families and others. And we aim to identify which are the best, the good practices and the innovations that facilitate this kind of improvement that I was saying. So this is a brief short presentation that you may enlarge if you like. If you just simply click on the website and you will see all what we do, our research, our current researchers and all our publications concerning the issue that we are discussing this evening. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mina, thank you Ricard and Miguel also for sharing this occasion to talk about something that I believe is an absolutely fundamental issue when we talk about equality of opportunities of people of migrant and minority origin, which is the education area. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the two projects that Mina mentioned, which is the main work that I have done in this field. The first project was called the Roma inclusion in education, fostering constructive attitudes and good practices in the Barcelona area. And this was a collaboration between ourselves here at Gritim and the two Roma associations called Fundació Privada per Closa and Roma Neciklovne and also with collaboration of the Barcelona City Council's Office of Non-Discrimination. And the aim of this project, which was partly research-oriented and partly implementation-oriented, was to improve the communication and relations between schools and Roma families in four neighborhoods in the Barcelona metropolitan area that are all characterized by very high levels of school failure and early abandonment and also with high concentrations of Roma population. And La Mina, Sandroc, Bompastora and El Gornal are the names of these neighborhoods. We had a fairly high amount of participants, all together 231 people, and we worked very intensively with them for 18 months. We both conducted ethnographic fieldwork and also practical activities to encourage more interaction between schools and families. Our main findings after concluding the analysis of this project was that the Roma families, all together 80 Roma families participated in the project and without exceptions they expressed high expectations on the education of the children in the sense that they were convinced that educational success was the only opportunity really for their children to have a better life than themselves. This was the words they usually employed to describe their preoccupation. They all had quite precarious life situations, and they were worried that their children would not be able to achieve a higher standard of living or greater opportunities than themselves, and they shared the view that education is the only key really to success in life for their children. However, they also experienced difficulties in being able to support their children adequately, and they generally expressed this as being due to the lack of time and resources and the economic and labor-related precariousness that they all lived in, all of the families except three mothers and fathers, for example, did not have any stable forms of employment. They generally worked with ambulating sales or sales in informal marketplaces in the informal economy, obviously, and had high degrees of insecurity, long work hours, unpredictable work hours, and difficulties really to, for example, help the children with homework. And also, we found that the experience of discrimination was very widespread among the mothers and fathers, and they expressed the fear that their children would also have these experiences, and that, for example, investing in higher education would not be worth the effort if they would still be affected by discrimination in work life. Now, this was a common worry that they expressed in the study. Overall, in any case, the families, what they mostly requested, was more support from the schools, and they have been included here, aside from a Roma father, which was illustrative of the view of these families. And he said, I don't know any Gitanos, Gitanos, the Spanish word for Roma, which is really gypsy, right? But it's quite different to say Gitano in Spanish compared to gypsy in English. It's not as negative, as pejorative. They use it themselves, for instance. I don't know any Gitanos who don't care about the children's education, but it is something else, whether they know how to help them or not, and the schools don't teach us, for instance, what we must do to make it a secondary school. Most parents cannot help their children with this. They have no education themselves. Then, on the other hand, in parallel, we conducted a study with the school staff, teachers and the headmasters of schools, for example, and also support staff as social workers and psychologists. And they overall expressed frustration, because they perceived that the Roma families were not enough involved or interested in the education of their children. This was the most common concern when asking the school staff, what is the matter? Why are the Roma students failing so disproportionately in school? And they overall also expressed low expectations on the educational outcomes of Roma pupils, which they justified by this being a fact that the situation was not very encouraging. And there were, however, large individual variations between the schools and between teachers in the same school, not the least concerning the causes for school failure, and where some of them tended, for example, to explain the situation by blaming Roma cultures, to speak, not saying that this is the way they are, they don't care about education, what's important for them is to get married early, et cetera. While others would say that this is because of the poverty and the marginalization, et cetera, but still the general sentiment, regardless of whether you would be more understanding, so to speak, towards the situation or not, was that the overall sentiment was frustration and the feeling that there's not much we can do because the families do not participate, they are not engaged, and there is only so much we can do in the schools. So overall, a high degree on family involvement was considered essential for educational success. For example, one headmaster of a school said, everyone who finished this school and had a strong support at home gets good grades in secondary school. It doesn't happen to a lot of children, but it happens. So here, in short, school success is dependent on family support at home, basically. Then they have time to talk about the other project, or? Yes, yes, yes. This is my current research project within the framework of my Marikori, which includes the education system within a study of three institutions in Catalan society, education, the Catalan police force, and the political and public administration of the city of Barcelona. And I conduct document and discourse analysis of, for example, policies and programs, websites and campaigns issued by these institutions, also media articles, and in the case of the schools, also textbooks used in primary and secondary school. I also conduct interviews with actors representing these institutions, as well as, for instance, immigrant associations. And I have not yet concluded the project, so I'm going to talk just about some preliminary findings here that refer to the education system. And this, what I have found overall, which I believe is most relevant in this context, is that the diversity management actually implemented in practice in the schools, the implementation of intercultural ideas in schools is completely voluntary, and it depends largely on individual school directors. There are no compulsory training programs, for example, no requirements at all in this field, only recommendations. And this leads to a situation in which there are huge variations between schools in how or if they work with the issue of diversity, right? Or whether, for example, racism is discussed, et cetera. And I have, it's a long quote I have here, but I think it's quite illustrative as well of the situation, that this is a person with high position of the Department of Education who says that it is not that the system is discriminatory, there is much awareness at Ensignement and also in many schools, but the reality is, of course, complex many times. I think that we have an excellent education system, but then how interculturalism diversity is implemented in different schools, it depends on the school boards and the teachers at each center. There are also differences between teachers. It depends on many things, on whether they have been trained in these issues, if they prioritize it, if they have reflected upon it. There are a series of recommendations in line with our interculturalism policy, though these are recommendations, not an imposition. I think that is important, we cannot force this on people. That was her view, that it should be voluntary, right? And representation of diversity in the school system, I would like to underline this, that it is inevitably linked to school failure and a success among children of immigrants, not only because we can assume that a greater representation of diversity, for example, in the content, educational material, but also among the teachers, for example, would inspire and be more inspiring for immigrant children and also make them and their families identify with the schools to a greater extent. That is one side of it, but there is also a more concrete link, right? That school failure automatically leads to a situation in which there are fewer children or youth of immigrant origin that could reach the university and then could potentially become teachers in the future, right? And these are recent data on school failure in Catalonia. We see that among ethnic majority, this is around 10%. If we look at the first generation of immigrants here, we have 17.3%. I think, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yes, and then it's actually higher among the second generation. Is that right? I think the sort of numbers I have, but it's just very surprising to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is what is extreme, what is most serious. I think that it is not only not better, but actually worse in the second generation. And then if we look at the Roma students, we have astronomical rates, really. More, far more than half of the Roma students do not manage to finish compulsory school at age 16. So some conclusions from Vackeripen and Repkat, these two projects that I just talked about. And they have formulated this in addressing Mina's questions. The idea of this debate would be to talk about problems or challenges, right? So I have formulated these conclusions in terms of two challenges and one problem. So the first challenge here that I have identified was the lacking mutual identification between schools and families. School staff are, it's a fact. They are mainly white, middle class, majority culture people who may have to a greater or lesser extent, which we found very clearly in the Roma project, difficulties in identifying with families who live in completely different worlds compared to their own, not perhaps many times with more urgent matters than the school activities. For instance, making enough money in the marketplace to buy food at the end. So the idea that the schools perceive as a lack of interest in education may in practice many times reflect a reality in which the families are overwhelmed with just very basic necessities. On the other hand, also the diverse families, the minority families or families of immigrant backgrounds or Roma families may have difficulties in feeling that the school represents them. There is this mutual perception of living in different worlds many times now. So what solutions can we imagine here? Just a few could be, for instance, to in the teacher training make it compulsory to talk about applied interculturalism, also transmitting knowledge about the life conditions among migrant groups and Roma. Right now, there is no such automatic inclusion of interculturalism diversity in the programs for future teachers at universities, for example. And another one could be more flexibility from the schools, for instance, trying to accommodate the needs of the families of more flexible schedules for school meetings to go a little bit outside of the regular hours for these meetings, which many times, and I know that's from my own experience, having children in the school system here, they often want you to show up in the middle of the day at one o'clock, for example, and this is, of course, not compatible with all kinds of situations now. So what may then be perceived from the school as a lack of interest when you don't show up is that you're actually not able to attend to those schedules, right? Also, real implementation of diversity in the school curricula could be one way to increase the sentiment among minority families that the school represents them by going a little bit outside of the European system. It's fair when including scientists, authors, artists, et cetera, no, revise history education to a greater extent talk about colonialism, for example, or about the Roma victims of the Holocaust, or some concrete examples of how this could be done in practice. The second challenge here was, it was very clear from this first project on Roma inclusion that the families overall requested more support from the schools. And how could this be done? For example, you could suggest that schools would extend and improve support systems. For instance, academic orientation and mentorship programs, which was much requested by the students, and also appreciated by the students in the cases that we found where schools actually did apply these kinds of methods. And what we found here was that it's not only important that the students have support, because there is this idea that family support is fundamental, but who supports the student is very important. And that this person actually has know-how resources, networks actually can help the student with concrete issues as finding scholarship opportunities, for instance. That is relevant. So family, of course, it's important, and it's positive to have your family backing you up, and at least not creating obstacles for you in your choice of continuing to study. But it's not necessarily enough, because if the family cannot help you with many of these practical issues that you need help with, and if nobody else does, that may be the factor that actually influences the student not continuing his or her studies. And here is a quote from a young man of Roma origin who now works as a school mediator, yes, two minutes, okay, he's finished this, yeah. And I think that this quote is quite important because he put the finger on what was exactly the issue for many of these young people and their families. So he says, they always say that the Hitano families do not worry about education. The reality is quite different. Many times the families are required to comply with different criteria, but they are not accompanied. My family has always wanted me to study always, but I did not make it because my mother wanted to, but because of the support that I got from school. In my work, I meet many parents who want an education for their children, but they do not get the support from the teachers. And so these are the two challenges that I think would be possible to solve, not within current frameworks if there is enough willingness to do so now. But what I define as a problem here that is more difficult to propose a solution for is the question of precariousness that is widespread among many migrant and Roma families, and which also affects directly the family-school relations and the possibilities for educational success. So lacking resources is, for example, a common impediment for learning. There are many students who don't have a PC at home. There were surprisingly many cases that we found during the Roma project of children who actually attended school hungry or in other quietly dressed, and the teachers explaining also, in some cases more or less desperately, that they could not focus on actual teaching because they had to attend to basic needs that go and buy sandwiches for children who hadn't had breakfast at home, et cetera. And also that parents are unable to pay for school fees as educational material, which has detrimental effect for children who then cannot follow the education at the same pace, and also that know that they will be unable to pay for post-compulsory education and therefore do not consider it worthwhile to support education more actively than they do. So what solutions to this problem that would be basically that more resources are necessary, it's a necessary component of policies to improve inclusion of diversity in the schools. But can anything be done right now without additional costs? Well, that would be then the support systems, information, mentorship programs, et cetera. So the challenges here are what I have defined as problems or difficulties that are possible to overcome through a change of mind, through training, awareness, racing, et cetera, while the problems, in my view, would be issues where more resources or structure changes are necessary. That's it. Okay, thank you both for your introduction. I wanted to start the dialogue by asking you. So what both of you think, how did the arrival of infants in the education system impact the educators' perspective of Roma students? Did this in any way change their perspective and their view or policies towards diversity? I would ask Miguel if you have an opinion on that because we did not really approach that issue, I have to say, about how we did not compare Roma or my immigrant students. And this was not so much an issue in the schools. The most, where there was a comparative approach on Roma and immigrant students in the schools where we did our study, it was mainly about the resources, right? That there were not enough resources for anyone. So the Roma families perceived that the arrival of immigrants meant less resources for them because more competition over, for example, scholarships for school meals or materials. That was mainly the issue related to immigrants versus Roma. Yeah, in order. So how did the arrival of immigrants in the education system impact the educators' perspective of Roma students? Well, I'd like to, I need to refer to one of my latest researchers in which we are trying to analyze the, this kind of impact as well as the relationship between culture and gender issues. We are doing a research for the Ministry of Education of Catalonia in those terms. We are acting, we are doing research in forks, in forks schools in Barcelona area, in metropolitan Barcelona area. And we realize we are not, we haven't finished it yet, but so far with all the data collected and all the evidences, we realize that both Roma and immigrant populations have these kind of challenges, maybe problems in terms of school achievement, right? So school achievement is a big issue for both. And the differences start from the point of expectation because we realize that for Roma families, expectations towards with respect to school are very low. Why that? Because normally the parents of Roma children of Roma pupils at schools used to be former Roma pupil students in those schools, in the same schools sometimes. And there are no, there is no tradition, there is no pathway of achievement of school success for Roma communities. It's very, there are very few cases of school success within the Roma community. One girl in this school, two boys in that school, it's very minority somehow. However, the expectation of migrant families with regards to education are very high. For some communities more than for others, but in general terms we realize that all of them agree and try to push their children to go better at school, to have good marks, to get qualifications, to get diplomas because they did a migration process in order to improve their standards of living and their social positions. So that is why they realize that education is an essential factor to do so. And that is why expectations with respect to education within migrant communities are higher than for Roma population. The second difference is that Roma population tends to be more stigmatized than migrant population. So when you have a look at those schools where we are doing research, we immediately realize that those who are more excluded and suffer more from exclusion and segregation are Roma children, are Roma pupils, not immigrant pupils because there is a kind of combination of factors between cultural, social and economical factors that create that kind of situation that this group is seen as an extremely marginalized group. However, migrants are competing to each other in order to leave these positions. When we have a look at the service on the citizenship perception of communities, migrant communities, Roma communities, since the 90s, you already know it. Studies from Calvavuetas and others already stated that Roma communities are the less considered by the whole population and this is reproduced within the schools and that is why Roma population have more difficulties for integration than migrant communities. And do you think this was even more accentuated after the arrival of immigrants as the policies for diversity are directed towards immigrants? Actually, I would say that the recent migration plays a role as a mirror, I mean. If this migrant population would not exist, probably Roma population would stay in the same position, would have the same social status, the lowest one. However, the arrival of migration creates a kind of competition in order to leave this latest position and it's a kind of mirror where we realize the difficulties and the real problems that the Roma population and Roma communities are suffering from. Yes, this is absolutely true of what Miguel is saying but I would like to add that I think that we need also to apply a more diversified view on the category of immigrant because there are huge differences between different groups of immigrants so if we pose a very, very diverse category of immigrant against the Roma which is a very specific ethnic minority, we fail a little bit in our analysis so for instance recently there were some statistics published on school failure among after-descendants which is nearly 50%. So it's almost not as high as among the Roma but far higher than among other immigrant groups for instance. So also this idea of immigrants being more competitive, it's definitely true to some extent but also it's much more complex really. There are lots of different situations and in this study that I read the summary of, recently you could see several similarities really between the after-descendants and the Roma narratives that we learned about so. So you have more diversification, what are we talking about when we talk about immigrants? Yeah, well I wanted to ask you, this was my next question which would be the, yeah. Really good question, sir. Good question. Okay, yeah you can add, yeah. You were mentioning how some immigrant communities have high expectations of their children regarding studying and going further to higher education. My personal feeling is that for example in the Pakistani community these expectations can be so high that are actually too high from my Catalan European perspective in the sense that all the family has migrated in order for the girls specifically to have better education and opportunities and so on. And so I would like to ask is this personal feeling that might be completely wrong, something that you are finding in these studies or not at all? I don't know if it's clear the question. As I was saying, every community creates a sort of expectation regarding their specific background on education. And it is clear that literature, Anglo-Saxon literature since the 90s clearly states that some communities, for instance, those coming from Asian countries, have higher expectations to respect to education rather than others. In the case of Bezos, Escola Prim, Escola Concepcionanal, Escola Duar Marquina, this specific situation is also reproduced because when you have a look at the specific school project, you realize that there are huge difficulties with Roma population within these schools. These are the ones who still keep getting late to school. These are the ones who is very difficult to enroll, to engage families for participation which creates a kind of barrier with respect to communication in order to know what to do on school homework or whatever. However, when you have a look at those Pakistani communities or even Chinese communities in Bezos, you also realize of that. I'm not talking about from the research perspective, but from my former experience in policymaking in that area, but this is reproduced in the schools. I'm doing research right now, and you simply see that even having a kind of Roma leader because those schools also count on a specific professional who cares on this inclusion of Roma families, students within the schools. These Roma leaders attend to school once twice a week in order to facilitate this kind of interaction between families, between both families and schools. However, this is extremely difficult and this creates serious concerns with respect what we have already learned about the importance of mentoring or modeling to promote integration because these communities already have this kind of figure, of this kind of role, this kind of professional. However, this is not working exactly as it had been initially expected. So we need to do more research on that in order to explore and understand why this lack of educational background on Roma communities is nearly, it's extremely high to be overcome somehow. Are there any more questions or no? I have a question regarding the solutions part, the first one, the one with teaching, training, more flexibility from the schools in this part. Is it like a policy on a local level or an individualistic level of each school or this district, for example, or is it a local, supposed to be local policy for all Catalonia, for example, or specific city? Okay, this solution that I suggested, this is taken from the policy recommendations we wrote at the end of our project. These are, of course, recommendations for schools to implement because right now, the way the school system works, each school would decide what methods to implement. And I personally think that is at least partially problematic, the fact that there is no coordination at the level of the Department of Education, to, for example, ensure that at least all teachers or future teachers receive some kind of training or awareness racing within the field of diversity and migration, for example, that I think that would be desirable, but that is not the case right now. So working with the current frameworks that we have, this would be a recommendation, basically, for schools to implement at the individual school level. So a lot of the issues you talked about, like specifically the children showing up undernourished, not prepared, or how these leaders, Roma leaders, aren't showing the effect that you thought they might, like a lot of it sounds like it's a wealth inequality issue as much as a diversity, and I just wonder how you isolate what is a diversity issue from what is just purely a wealth inequality issue in these schools. Do you want to start, or? I can be very brief. I just say that I absolutely agree to a large extent it is a socioeconomic issue, and we have a situation where economic, socioeconomic disadvantage is racialized, right? We have an overrepresentation of situations of precariousness and lacking resources among people of Roma origin, also of migrant origin, particularly among Afro descendants, for instance, one of the most precarious communities. So absolutely, and it's very hard to distinguish between what matters the most, right? And what we found, and what I think is particularly relevant when talking about the Roma, is that many of the situations explaining the low engagement in school, despite families expressing real expectations, were related to their economic, social situation, and not to the fact that they were Roma, but the schools would interpret that as part of Roma culture. That was an important misunderstanding of the reasons behind lacking involvement. In order to discuss it more, I would say that cultural factors are really relevant in those terms, because when you have a look at Roma communities that are more economically developed somehow, you simply realize that their behavior and their attitudes towards the school remain the same. And this should make us think a little bit about that. Cultural factors deeply matter in the case of Roma population. And this is clear, because the culture for Roma population is a kind of, let's say, a shelter with respect to the symbolic aggression that sometimes the mainstream society has been pushing towards them for centuries. So culture is the single place, is the nest where these communities can feel safe and comfortable. And in this culture, school is not playing a prominent role. So cultural factors in the case of Roma population really matter. And in the case of migrant population, let me simply say that, for instance, in the city of Barcelona, we have a mentoring program to provide support for migrant teenagers that successfully passed all those compulsory secondary education examinations and everything. However, they don't attend to university. And this is not because of economic reasons. When we started doing research on that field, we realized that there were cultural symbolic factors that were explaining why those teenagers did not attend to the university. All of them used to have the right marks and diplomas and everything. They all passed the examinations. However, there were some internal cultural attitudes that acted as barriers towards their integration in higher education. This university is taking part in this program, Prometheus program, and it's a program addressed to work with cultural materials, with cultural values and others, because it is cultural factors which explain those teenagers did not attend to higher education. Now, thanks to this program, most of them already do the follow-up and are integrated within the university. I'm sorry. Of course, what I meant to say was not that cultural factors are not relevant, because they are, of course they are, but they are not the only factors that are relevant. In practice, Roma culture is often mixed up with what we would call a cultural marginalization or a culture of belonging to a low social class, and that would be certain behaviors that were actually related more to that socio-economic status would, from the side of the schools, be interpreted as expressions of Roma culture, and that is something that I think both ourselves as researchers and school staff must be very cautious of, and what I think is fundamental for the schools to really work with these issues and improve inclusion is to really try to see the individual and not see a culture when they look at a Roma student, for example, or a student of a migrant origin, because we found also much more diversity among the families and the individual students than we expected. Some identified very strongly with Roma culture, and then what Roma culture was could be a hundred different things for a hundred different people. Also, some people did not identify very strongly with Roma culture, maybe more with the music taste or a sports activity or something, so I think it's very simplistic to just apply the cultural lens on minorities now, and that's counterproductive. Yeah, but not forget that it exists also. We can agree on that. I'm sure it's not the only factor. I just want to ask you how much schools are doing to include the culture of the migrant and Roma students in the curriculum, at least? Sorry. So how much are schools doing to include the culture of the Roma or immigrant families in the curriculum? Is there any basis for that? They simply don't. I had the opportunity to work, I've been working with Roma population for more than 20 years in Bezos or in San Cosme and other neighborhoods in this country, and my experience is that this doesn't simply exist. So curriculum does not reflect the reality of Roma population. Maybe you, Xenia, have more examples and more knowledge about that, but from my practical experience, the answer is no. We tried to do a project, an action research project in San Cosme, in order to move on a better situation in those terms, and we tried to create some language materials by using the Roma language, together with Catalan and Spanish, and Roma stories, Roma tales. So we kindly invited to some families from the neighborhood, some families that used to have children attending to the school, and we joined with grandmothers, mothers, fathers, uncles, and all kind of representatives for the community, and we recorded tales and stories, Roma stories, Roma tales. With all that information, we tried to analyze a little bit the content. We tried to type all those stories, and we made a kind of, we reached into a kind of agreement with the speakers and the participants in the group in order to agree with the content of the tales and the stories. We also asked the children to make drawings and pictures to illustrate the content of these tales and stories, and from that moment on, we edited it in a proper version, and from that moment on, that material is the one that the school is using for literacy, for the learning to read and write, and all that importance. And this is the only, the single experience I know in Catalonia that was intended to create a specific material coming from the Roma community through a participatory process and being used for teaching purposes. One example from our project is very similar, that's a very good example, I think, and then in one of the schools where we worked, they were just, well, in parallel with the implementation of our project, they started to remodel the library of the school and included also Roma stories and Roma authors in the library, and that was very much appreciated by the students, they were even surprised. Wow, we can go to the library and we can pick a book about our culture and our stories, that was big for them. And I think that could also ideally be implemented even in schools where there are no Roma students. For also mainstream, majority students would learn more about Roma culture, which is part of really of Spanish and Catalan culture. These are still not any standardized practices in schools. It's just dependent on the school to implement it or a specific project. I'm sure that Miguel, you have a more better overview of the whole school system than I have, but the impression I have from these two projects that I've been working with is that it's very much dependent on each individual school, on the individual director even though maybe we're engaged in these issues or not. There is a specific policy for the Roma community, however it is true that this policy that initially in the 80s used to be what was called the compensatory education programs because when you have a look at the policies 20, 30 years ago with respect to Roma population those policies were specifically addressed to compensate the lack, the deficit because that was the approach when from the 90s on we start to talk about inclusion rather than integration and compensatory policies then we start to create programs from that inclusive perspective but honestly those programs have not been exhaustively analyzed specifically with respect to the impact and those programs deeply depend on the attitude of the school staff and the people. However I have to say that all the schools that are working with Roma population no matter if it is in metropolitan area of Barcelona or Fond de la Polvura in Girona or Torreforta in Tarragona all those schools that are rooted within communities with a strong Roma identity they all are kindly invited to work in that perspective so it is more than a policy a need and the school staff is extremely conscious of that. I can add in addition to that I think an important finding in our project was that the students of Roma origin who experienced direct situations of racism and discrimination in the schools were in all cases students whose parents tended to have actually higher educational ambitions and they placed their children in semi-private schools or in schools that had a very good reputation with a majority of white Catalan students and there they experienced racism not so much from the school staff which also happened but mainly from the other families and when they felt that other children were not allowed to play with them their parents said don't interact with the Roma kids that's a problem and so on so the level of inclusion and awareness and work methods that are positive for these students were generalized in the schools where the high rate of Roma students but in the schools where the Roma students were a small minority we found very different situations and those were the children who had difficulties with the exclusion and some even ended up leaving school because of that feeling so the idea that that would improve the opportunities actually paradoxically turned out to be the other way around because of the non-inclusion that they experienced. So would you say that Roma or even children that would be would prefer to be in schools with high levels of diversity from your projects? I would guess so. Social reality is a fact so children attend to the school it is placed in their neighborhood so if the neighborhood has an increasing number of people with those features it is the school that has to reflect that kind of reality. That's also a problem that's related to the segregation if you would imagine ideal scenario where you would take all the pupils of Barcelona in a bowl and throw them out in equal numbers across the schools with maybe 10-15% of immigrant and Roma students in all schools maybe that would be the ideal scenario then we wouldn't have the situation but it's quite new topic but they are changing they are making changes right now at the level of the Department of Education I think it's important to talk about that too when we talk about diversity in schools how the admission works they used to for example be a system where you get points for different criteria and one of those criteria was to be a former student of the same school and that would of course be detrimental for the opportunities of newcomers to enter the schools if people are given priority based on having been themselves students of that school so they take their children to the same school and they enter before and that is something that has just been abolished so that's one way to try to buy some micro-measures to combat segregation and I wanted to ask you since you mentioned about inclusive education what would you consider are the basis for an inclusive education well to reply to that question I brought some slides because one of the hypotheses that we think about this issue of inclusion of inclusive society and inclusive schools school system has a direct relationship to an evidence that we find out when you have a look at the situation of the educational systems society is new but educational systems tend to remain the same so inclusion will be an opportunity another problem a challenge another problem when we try to move from the former educational systems into new frameworks where inclusion can be and this responds to three big policies the first one that schools realize that education is not only a concern for themselves but also for the whole community the more you push the schools to open up their doors and welcome people to the community to participate into a democratic let's say governance the better the inclusive ethos will be possible to set up and this seriously implies some issues on that the relationship between the school and the community has a strong link to implement educational projects closely related to communities we realize that when we talk about school communities those school communities are very inclusive and regarding the cultural diversity and other types of diversity intersectional perspective are better included somehow the second one is to move from the notion, from the idea that the school is a whole system to understand that the system is created within the community and this is also very important because one single school cannot have all the resources that may need to cover the needs to supply all the issues, all the proposals that are needed to create to build up an inclusive education so the more the schools are working in a network together to one to each other the more schools integrate into a specific system closely related to the neighborhood and the community the better the schools will be able to do so so we need to shift into a systemic strategy with some ideas to overcome the one single rule or to overcome the special needs that migrants or Roma have and to create this kind of opportunities in terms of diversity and the third one is to move from integration to inclusion this is a very important topic for an educational framework because inclusion tries to understand that all of us need some attention all of us have special needs not only some of the students or some of the participants that is why to move into an inclusive atmosphere creates this framework where these traditional methods are basically apart and we introduce those methods that facilitate that all the students may find their own place within the school and could you give any example of what you mean more relation with the community just what is this mean in practice does that mean more relation with the entities in the neighborhood community services we may consider that the school is a place where lessons are given or the school is a cultural and social meeting place for the whole community where obviously in the morning you have lessons lessons closely related through some methodologies project methodologies with the community but maybe in the afternoon in the evening there are some other cultural activities like music, arts sports and this is the school as well as a whole ethos that is working together and the activity in the morning the activity in the afternoon the activity in the evening creates a kind of a whole experience for the children and the youngsters of the community this is a reality in some of our neighborhoods I may give some concrete examples if you like in some neighborhoods but the whole idea is to create that global approach on education where the school plays a prominent role but it is also complemented with other educational activities in the field of culture in the field of arts in other fields that make the school a locus of culture and creation and community development somehow and is this only oriented to children who are migrants as far as I know because from my experience, from my research in Raval all of these activities were concentrated they were directed towards immigrant children or Roma children and that further that was segregating further them from the other students in the case of this notion of community education is for the whole community not only for those who are migrants or Roma with a Roman background just a little technical detail when I hear you speak about inclusive education when I check this some literature regarding this, at least in the Catalan context I have the feeling I might be wrong that this concept is used more for students with disabilities with functional diversity so for instance the school I used to go to I was surprised that they defined themselves, they labeled themselves as an inclusive school but I feel like they might be absolutely not a single migrant student and on the other hand I did find a lot of literature talking about intercultural education I wonder if we're talking about the same thing or the notion of inclusion we must look at the background in the notions and the ideas that the Warnock report in 81 and Mayela Ainscombe for UNESCO used to produce during the 80s that notion of inclusion which is mainly educational this is an educational approach tends to overcome the notion of integration because integration is mainly devoted to those children that have a kind of disability when we talk about inclusion we open up this conception and try to include and understand that actually we all have special needs somehow this is reconfirmed by the UNESCO in 2004 and the International Conference of Education in Geneva 2008 both conferences state that inclusion is a model for diversity management for all not only for those with disabilities and this is reconfirmed by the international programs such as the Big Strategy Education 2020 or the Global Development Goals the current Global Development Goals the goal number four is address to education if you have a look at it you will realize that the notion of inclusion is not addressed to those with disabilities but for all in terms of a global conception of understanding a radical diversity including not only disabilities but also cultural issues gender issues religious issues, linguistic issues sexual orientation issues everything so intercultural education would be a specific topic on this notion of inclusion and diversity so when you talk about inclusion that it covers all type of diversities for example one that I consider that it would be quite easy to cover and it's not always covers the socio-economical because there are many countries many welfare state defined themselves welfare state countries that have help for all the children under 18 that have the same opportunities and I have the feeling that here in Catalonia or in Spain we don't really target that because if you are explaining that there are cases of undernourished children or not well-dressed what about that from a policy perspective I mean how to address this situation how to give aid or help as you say of course there is a policy or a political issue and it's about political decisions and political will and distribution policies but I also think that we have to bear to talk about structural inequalities in the education system here in Catalonia as in the rest of Spain we have a strongly structurally unequal system with a strong division for example between public and private schools which also contributes to this ethnic and socio-economic segregation that we see as a result and that has detrimental effects for the opportunities of the children so I think if we don't talk about it also from that angle we miss part of the root causes for this situation of school failure it is years that evidence based research by OECD for instance the state that we need to move from an equality paradigm into an equity paradigm there are very remarkable literature by OECD which simply states that which are the specific measures that educational systems must implement in order to move into an equity framework and I think this is a good way to understand how we may overcome that socio-economic gap that some families suffer from and this is basically one of the major challenges. Let me recommend you one report which has been recently published by Intermon Oxfam the author is Xavier Bonal, it is titled Equidad Educación en España which is extremely simple and it is a kind of literature review based on evidence as I was saying and ten topics are focused there in order to understand which are the main elements we need to be aware in order to create a more equitable system in Spain for instance which has been published one month ago and it is very reachable on the web. Thank you very much first about how mainstream cultures may oppress minorities but also mainstream education might also undermine some groups and that leads to the question of education and who takes the role of education which tools we choose to employ in the educational settings and with that said I want to please that you develop a little bit more how have you incorporated how have you experienced more alternative educational means educational tools in the decades here in Catalonia and that I said because if we define success as attending university or having good grades some people have already failed even before it started but as we know some Bremen communities have highlighted more of artistic or less conventional areas and how do we create more opportunities and foster more programs and projects related to what they know best back home and I do have a question to you as well Zeni Zeni I think Zeni in the Swedish education system people have designed policy more specific to minority groups as well including language classes to minority populations Romans included so I want to know how you as a Swedish person see yourself researching in the Catalan context maybe we can take one more question here or a few I wanted to ask about the school and community pairing like increasing the proximity as a new framework I don't know much about the context here but from what I understand there is a difference between so like considering that difference and I'm assuming that the communities of private schools would be richer themselves while free not paid schools would have poor communities I wonder if this pairing and this collaboration would maybe even deepen possibly this discrepancy and secondly also I want to ask Professor Zeni as a research kind of of Roma kids who went to paid schools were discriminated more as the parents themselves were encouraging their kids to act in a more racist manner against them so again I assume with the community and school hitting a closer and working together I wonder if the families themselves would be included wouldn't this be a potential arena for further tension as families are there and like I think I told like I would like to hear what you think about it thank you Thank you for the fruitful debate I think it's very interesting and an opportunity to speak about education that is not in the master and then I think it's a good way for all of us to have this topic in any case the mapping that you have done is interesting but I have maybe one conceptual concern also it's about the concept of failure because it's one of them what does exactly means when you speak about failure which is very important in most of the data because and I see that they are not a consensus about what does failure means because failure may means that there is no opportunity to go to the university then maybe this is a failure or a failure may means that they don't reach the level and that they must abandon the after the compulsory school they must abandon the school system they don't go but failure may also means and then I think this could be interesting to explore at least from my ignorance because I'm not from education of course but the idea that the starting point and then we reach the idea of equity there I think so the starting point of this kind of choice that come from migration, background that come from from romance they don't enter in the education system with the same tools with the same opportunities the starting point is then failure means in this case that the school system don't manage to solve the potentiality of a school sure they don't and then from this point of your failure I think it could be a very interesting concept because the idea is that for one reason or another the reason that you are taking now but the school system for one way or another does not manage to solve the potentiality of exclusion and then people that go from this kind of profile still have exclusion in the background when they abandon the school and so on I think the idea of inclusion and exclusion is very important in the definition of failure but I just wonder which kind of definition you have of failure which I think is not a consensus and then the way we define failure may also be important in the way we are dealing with this debate and another one just for maybe for Xenia because I know that she's working on that but I think at the level of solutions or I believe the level of the idea of the curriculum is very important the idea that colonialism is not in the and now that I am myself working on colonial and postcolonial studies and so on there is a trend that say that most of the racism and most of the discrimination existing in all societies are very linked to colonialism because we are racist with because the whole story are criminalized culture here in Morocco and then racism belongs to whole story because the expulsion of a Muslim is related to that and then from this point of view the idea that to incorporate in curriculum this kind of thing that completely disappears with intentions from the curriculum is very important and another one is the representative I would like myself I always say that my daughter have a professor of mathematics I would like to have this kind of representativity and at this level the representative in Spain is very low and then that's play a negative effect on the failure that we are speaking because most of the professor are white and has not represent the diversity that already exist and the fact that somebody has a professor that is from Morocco background, Chinese background Filipinos or whatever or Roma background I am fully convinced that may help to reduce this kind of failure but just to know your opinion about that about failure do you want to start? Thanks for such an interesting discussion on those topics to start first with the colleague who was interested on that issue of education and those missing areas of culture and others let me first say that from that community education perspective education goes beyond schooling and this is closely linked to the issue of equity that we were already mentioning because nowadays the big challenge is not only inside the school maybe 50 years ago half a century ago the big challenge was that all the children go to school but nowadays there are 70 million children who don't attend at school in the world and this is not a little number 70 million is a lot and we need to move and work more and more to overcome this big problem however most of the population attend to school this is not the problem the problem is that despite all of them attend to school some of them keep being successful with lots of resources and others and others stay apart and that is why this idea that education goes beyond schooling tries to introduce some alternative issues that are important for our society today in terms of culture, humanities and others that make the difference when dealing and providing opportunities for equality and that is why we need to move on that perspective concerning public and private let me say that within private schools there is also a remarkable diversity of them so there are private schools with an exclusive interest of competition and being the first ones those schools are normally reluctant towards culture or other notions of community education however you realize you may find public schools that are seriously providing opportunities for equality they are fighting for the right to education of all the children in deprived areas economically deprived areas and you also find public schools in some well-off areas where this notion of community or society and others are missing so the ownership of the establishment let's say so is not as remarkable as in other times so it is obvious that public schools must provide a public service and they must be open to all they mustn't discriminate anyone because it is an imperative according to their nature however it is not as clear as in other previous periods because both public and private are in a process of transformation where the notion of governance creates a new framework and private stakeholders work together hand in hand to push the educational system for success let me remind the UNESCO report in 2015 titled Rethinking Education it's very short if you are interested in the issue I would kindly suggest to read it it is also reachable on the web and this PDF shows that the cooperation between private and public sector is the key for success within the educational system and they develop this kind of rational and try to provide background and so on so I would go in that way and concerning the two questions by I think that in recent literature more than talking about failure it is said under achievement concerning standards because if we think that it is not a kind of failure but it is an achievement which is not necessary enough to become well integrated in society and the notion of underachievement I think it is in recent literature the one which is becoming more and more well accepted and concerning the curriculum and this post colonialism work that we all have to do you simply reminded me Sosa Santos and the notion of the importance of the more than the presences so maybe we need to focus also our attention on the absences rather than the presences and maybe in this way will be able to introduce within the curriculum because it is not a matter of criticizing the current curriculum this is not right or whatever but it is much better to understand and analyze what is really missing and from that perspective to increase the value of cultural diversity somehow Yes, I would like before I answer your question about Swedish compared to the Catalan school system very interesting question, thank you for that I would just like to add a comment between public and private schools for those of you who are not familiar with the Catalan school system when we talk about private schools here we talk about the semi-private schools generally the concertadas which are partially publicly funded and which for instance in some more socioeconomically marginalized neighborhoods for instance may offer free education thanks to scholarships so it is not necessarily elite schools that we are talking about but still I think what Miguel said I think it is relevant to distinguish here between content how diversity for example is addressed in the content in the curriculum of the school and the question of access what families can access certain schools still it is a fact that in the cases of most the concertadas semi-private schools you will have to be able to pay a fee of around 400 euros per month or otherwise if you are not eligible for a scholarship you cannot have your child in that school and that is a very segregational mechanism it is hard to get around that and it is the same public schools which are supposed to be free of charge what we found in our Roma study for instance was that still the economic, the costs of the school actually was a segregational mechanism and that also influenced on the teacher's perception on certain families as problematic for instance the families, generally Roma families who were not able to pay for excursions so the child would be left alone in class while the rest of the class went to a water park for instance now with all the emotional consequences for the child and for the family who felt publicly shamed in other cases the families who could not pay for costs for school material they were not given that material so everybody would go out with their books except those children whose parents could not pay for the books for instance and the others would sometimes humiliate them and so those were very uncomfortable situations that were completely related to the kind of economic segregation in the schools right also in public schools so for me that is actually the most striking and most shocking thing coming from the Swedish system where everything is completely free of charge there are no private schools there are free schools that are run privately but completely funded by the public system so that is one thing that is shocking for me because it's a kind of very cemented inequality that is very much taken for granted and I noticed that when I discussed this with different actors even very progressive people tend to not question the fact that we have almost 50% of students in private schools with the segregation that implies so that is one thing the other thing about the multicultural education is true that Sweden is known for its emphasis on the home language education the right to home language education in schools there are no clear results on whether this has been positive or negative for the learning or the results of minority students and I think personally that when the Swedish school system nowadays is not an example of success it has rates of underachievement or school failure if you want to use that term similar to the Spanish case and I think that's more related actually to the very strong geographical segregation rather than the way schools function so I think that in that case the other demographic and socioeconomic circumstances and ethnic segregation are more influential than actually how they work in the school curriculum here in Catalonia they are just now implementing a new program called plurilinguism that is a way to implement home language education in the school curriculum during regular school hours and also to encourage majority ethnic students of Catalonia students to learn languages as Arabic or Chinese for example during school hours and I think it would be interesting to see the results of that I think it's a positive attempt to diversify the schools so to speak so we'll see what happens with that about the term failure the fact that I use the term failure in my work is because it's the term used in politics in policies etc and there is a very concrete very clear definition school failure is here defined as not finishing is so not finishing secondary education at age 16 with an approved result now people who do not graduate from compulsory school are considered to have failed in the school system and that is a very early level of failure actually when you're 16 from these students we saw the numbers 64% of Roma students around 30% of immigrant students do not achieve to finish compulsory school which means that they cannot continue to secondary or less so tertiary education so if we want more representation of diversity in schools which I personally believe it's completely fundamental that we have Moroccan, Pakistani and African origin teachers in the schools also to make minority families identify with schools to encourage minority students to continue and to see that they can also become teachers etc but in order to achieve that we need to combat the school failure and achieve more students of minority origins at the universities to become teachers I was very happy with after this Roma project one of the young Roma women we worked with actually started to study to become a teacher at the University of Catalonia that's one example but still in the beginning these are individual exceptional cases and for that to become something normalized there is still a long way to go and I think that in order to get there one of the things we have to address is this also this socioeconomic segregation that I mentioned and finally the curriculum of course it's very central the content of what are taught in schools actually how do we understand history and the role of other other cultures, other continents migrations etc and I think it's important there that this is not only a question to be treated in schools with high levels of diversity but it should be completely normalized also in schools in areas where they may not be any or almost no students of migrant origin it would still be normalized in the curriculum let's talk about colonization, slavery, Roma history etc I just wanted to say I think before no there was education for citizenship in the Catalan curriculum is this still on? No not anymore since 2019 sorry 13 I wanted to say because citizenship education used to be in the curriculum from 2006 until 2013 with the Education Act late education but after 2015 with the new Education Act it simply disappeared because of the ideological issue citizenship education used to teach this subject wanted the students to learn that equality was an important value for living together in the field of culture but also in the field of gender in the field of sexual orientation in the field of disabilities in the field of discrimination to any kind of social issues and the political majority at that moment considered that this was a kind of ideological instruction inside schools and they tried to take it out I figure that in this current curriculum reform that we are living now in Spain thanks to the shift in the Spanish government with the new kind of correlation in the in the field of politics we'll find we reconsider this decision and we'll try to introduce a kind of citizenship education maybe it will not be told this way because this would simply remind some former curricular approaches that might create a real problem of discussion an argument within society probably it will be told ethics education or others but the importance that the school must play an important role to build up values and educate in values through the students is a consensus nowadays and I figure that this will be a reality from very soon on do you want to say something about this or do we take more questions the last one maybe very final comment just in relation to this we talk about schools and we talk about minority families but we don't talk much about the mainstream or majority families and I think that is very important especially when we saw that the cases of discrimination for example in the Roma project were mainly cases of the diversity of the school where their children were and that is something I think we need to include in this debate to a greater extent and the address and to what extent do you think schools are promoting more intercultural relations between different ethnic groups immigrants and Roma or between families or they're just directing their policies towards Roma or towards immigrant families just towards one again that depends very much on the character of the school because what we found when we talked to the families and we talked to school directors and both teachers and directors who wanted to participate in the project and those who were not willing to and some of the conversations were also off the record and all together the picture that we got was that in the schools with high levels of diversity of high degrees of immigrant students and Roma students everybody from the majority culture who would take their kids there they know where they are going and they are also of course informed about that by the teachers and by the staff and you know that this is a diverse school and you don't have a problem with that but in the other schools where diversity is still exceptional we found more examples of directors who would consider it maybe something that they don't want to highlight or that they would say to majority families perhaps this is the perception based on interviews with minority families right but they had the feeling that school staff are siding with the majority families against them that they felt that they are like okay so we are sorry we have these Roma students here but we cannot do much about it but that feeling was transmitted to us and what would you do for schools to solve these problems between the families let me say that family participation, family engagement maybe it is better family engagement, family involvement is a recent issue in our country I mean a recent issue only two, three decades of importance so the current parents when they bring their children to schools they did not live in participatory schools somehow they have no background on a notion of school that is open to the community and where families may take part when you have a look at the difficulties that migrant families tend to have when participating at schools, language is one of the major barriers because not all the people when they arrive in the country well are fluent or they have proficiency in the school language and then they feel this is a barrier to getting involved in the school however there are some experiences and some good practices we may identify where we realize that some parents with a migrant background that have been staying in the country for more years tend to have this kind of role of translators not mediators or mentors translators and thanks to this translation they often have more opportunities more chances for participating and getting involved in the school of their children sometimes in the case of secondary education it is the children themselves who act as translators for their parents and it is a kind of special acknowledgement for those children because they already got the language the school language and they become useful for their parents in order to facilitate communication with staff or whatever in the case of Roma language is not an issue mainly in terms of not in terms of basic it is a big issue but not in terms of general language education in Spanish for instance but the barriers are more in terms of as I was saying before of expectation and also concerning the needs and the benefits that this participation may bring to those families Roma communities are very practical and they always try to culturally reflect and understand if what they are going to do is useful or not what is the sense we all do that for sure but in the case of Roma communities when they receive proposals from the school the first question is why what is the sense what is the aim that you pursue when you do this proposal so if you create sensible proposals they participate if you just say you have to come to this meeting with parents to talk about the curriculum and the curricular goals for your children this year well this makes no sense this doesn't make sense for myself either when I have to attend my parents' meetings for my children it's very difficult to me to understand what is the real meaning of going there and listening to multiplication, division the frog the geography and others but maybe because of my cultural background I may support these kind of meetings in the case of Roma population they are extremely practical the common sense is something that is strongly rooted in their way of understanding and dealing with and that is why sometimes we need to create real meaningful approaches to make to facilitate those families come to the school if you go on traditional proposals concerning curriculum evaluation, assessment or others it's not appealing for them do you think the communication strategies are working with these families are they failing to communicate well? the big issue is that sometimes there is a big confusion within schools between information and communication schools normally inform they provide sheets with information within the school bags of children they sometimes send you a WhatsApp message by saying tomorrow there is an excursions here or there you have to bring these or that this is information but not communication communication requires time and this is what is sometimes missing schools because sometimes teachers don't have enough time to communicate with families sometimes they don't want but sometimes they do but they don't have enough spaces to real communication to really communicate with families communication in terms of a dialogic discourse with families building up together a common sense of schooling and trying to respect and understanding what they expect from the school and trying to integrate those issues within the school project educational project and in that framework perhaps to a greater extent be flexible and be willing to change or try other methods as well and this is an attitude often in the schools and I think that is mainly because of pressure lack of time because of routine because this is the way we have always done it but to transmit to the students and their families that this is the way we do it here like it or not and I noticed that a lot with my own children school as well as a foreigner who may not be completely always agreeing with all the ways we do it here but there is very little tolerance for questioning and the critique is not very well taken so that is something that we could transmit to the schools I think more egalitarian dialogue and willingness to try new ways of doing things maybe we can take the last couple of questions there is five minutes hi so I have a question for Mikael you were talking a little bit about the practicality issue and you said that it is sort of rooted in Roma culture and I guess my question is do you think that culture is the source of the need to be practical or more socioeconomic problems that are structural and a part of everyday life for Roma communities so things like access to resources like time knowledge or previous school experience that could inform a parent as to why it is important to attend a meeting like that I was wondering anyone who would like to answer about the importance of the role of non-formal education in the sense of chaos and supplies so that is kind of this which is very popular in Catalonia and I think can be very powerful in intercultural educations or the different topics we have been talking about especially in chaos from those or many other neighborhoods with high numbers of immigration and also in this group I would include monitors counselors that work in the playground of schools so outside of the formal classes even during lunch time this kind of when parents come and leave to the kids and so on I have some friends working in this group roles and I think these are very important moments of the day in school that are sometimes not appreciated last question there was no hand no sorry well I'm a Marxist from the 80s since the 80s so I would never neglect socio-economic factors it's probably the reason why I seriously think that we need to consider some other factors in order to go to more complex explainings that if you don't do that you won't be able to understand the real complexity so all the factors are remarkable all the factors are relevant I never denied in my discourse that socio-economic factors are not remarkable but that is the reason why precisely I need to put the focus on social and cultural factors because they are illuminating they are highlighting some factors some dynamics that in other terms would not be understandable so in terms of understanding why Roma population becomes more practical I think that it is due to more social and cultural factors rather than socio-economic factors and I would be willing to be in another debate on that issue if you like I'm really in the mood to do it another day and to go deeper into that question if you like to understand better the reasons from one side or another I don't know those factors but I think seriously saying that everything matters is not a good answer in research so you have to go and get committed to your data and say this is probably more remarkable than that or that one and you need to create a kind of explanation where all the factors issues and some of the factors explain others and it doesn't happen anything on that and concerning non-formal education I absolutely agree with you it's essential from the perspective of inclusion and intercultural education and you also mentioned I think which is really important and becomes invisible in our country more than 40% of the timing that primary school student spends inside the school is outside the classroom you understand so the importance of those places of those let's say free time activities the importance of the break during the lunchtime the extracurricular activities after the school in the afternoon and others is really very remarkable and we need to focus on that non-formal education as a source of opportunities to build up inclusion together close together with the schools addressing your question specific question about Cal extracurricular activities of course there is again one economic dimension which is the fact that many of these activities have high costs for example sports classes etc we know that many minority students cannot engage in these activities because of the cost but there is clearly also a cultural dimension in for instance the cow cow is in itself not expensive but when you go to the cow you get a sense that this is a very monocultural Catalan environment I have had my own children in the cow and I've been very engaged in that extracurricular activities and I know the feeling that you don't know exactly what's going on but you're very different from the rest maybe there is a special event outside of the activities they're at somebody's house and you're not invited these kind of experiences I think are more likely to happen if you come from a minority group even if you're a Swedish immigrant so I think that well I understand the feeling that many minority students and their families have that they are more at ease they feel better in more international environments where there are people from lots of different cultures interacting together so maybe one thing one way to improve inclusion is of course increasing the rate of participation in the cow and other forms of activities in the Catalan society but also to invent new forms new activities, new institutions oh sorry the scouts the cow is the scouts in the Catalan yeah oh cow of course cow okay happens when you go local unfortunately don't explain it it doesn't make sense at all of course so if there are no further questions we can end thank you very much for your participation thank you very much


And I'm not saying, when I'm, when I'm, when I'm talking about this, I'm not saying that you have to change the world. I'm just saying that you have to change your life. Today we're going to be talking about how to step into your own personal power. And I'm going to talk about the small decisions that you make, the big decisions that you make, but I'm going to talk about how every single decision that you make in your life is based in either one of two places. Every decision that you make is either based out of fear or it's based out of personal power. So it's either fear or it's power. Those are the two places that you can make decisions from. There are no other places you can make decisions. The problem though is that, at least for me, most of my life until I realized this is that most of my decisions were made out of fear, which is also called scarcity. I was in a scarcity mode. I wasn't raised with a whole lot. I didn't know anything about business. I didn't know anything about growing a business or growing a podcast or growing stuff. And so a lot of my decisions that I've made in my life were based out of fear, even though I felt like I should probably make a different decision. You know, when I look back on my entire life, most of them were made out of fear. And so what I want you to think about for yourself, if you look back on your entire life and all of things that you've done and all of the decisions that you've made, have they been based out of power of a place of personal power and stepping into your personal power, or have they been made from a place of fear, of scarcity?  I won't invest into myself because it costs more money. I won't start that business because I know it's going to cost me money to do. You know, those are based out of fear. And when we talk about fear, you have to realize that fear is a good thing and fear is also a bad thing because fear will show you the edge of your comfort zone and show you where you're on the edge of your comfort zone. So if you want to push past it, you continue to keep going or fear, if you listen to it as a bad thing, because it will keep you in the exact same place that you're in. And fear was a great thing for our ancestors. They kept them alive a hundred thousand years ago when they had to be fearful of possibly walking by a bush and a lion being in there. So that fear kept our species alive. But now today fear is actually one of the things that holds people back the most. And you may have heard me talk about it. I had a psychedelic journey a few years ago where I really realized that fear is the worst thing in the world because without fear, if we had no fear, there wouldn't be any wars or wouldn't be any killings. There wouldn't be people that were looking at people that didn't look like them or act like them and hating them. Fear holds people back from making a true connection and really growing. But also fear holds people back from starting the business that could possibly change the world or cure cancer or be able to change global warming. They're just too fearful of actually taking that step. So if fear were not there, this place could be amazing. This could be a utopia. This could be just an amazing place that we could live in, but fear holds us back. When I look back on my life, a lot of my decisions were made in fear. What I realized is I got to a point in my life where I looked at my life and I didn't have the life that I wanted. I knew that there was more and I knew that if I wanted to create the life that I wanted to create, I would have to step out of fear. I would feel the fear, but I would have to continue doing it anyways. My decisions were all made to keep me in my comfort zone and its simplest form to keep me in the exact same position that I always was in. Why does it come from fear? Because like I said, fear is the thing that kept us alive. But the part that existed in our ancestors, 100,000, 200,000 years ago in their brains still exists in our brains today. See amygdala?  It keeps you alive. It is a great thing.  Let me ask you something.  It goes to fear base that starts making things up that don't even exist. That's what happens is a brain that's that you don't pay attention to will automatically go to fear. So how can you stop going to fear and everything that you do? And this is why it's very, very important. For you, for me, for all of us, for every single person to become very self-aware and I want you to think about all of the great decisions that have happened in this world, all of the amazing things that have changed the course of history. Think about all of those great decisions. Now I want to ask you a question. How many of those great decisions do you think came from a place of fear? Don't worry. I'll give you a second. How many came from a place of fear? Probably none of them, right? I don't mean fear of death. I don't mean fear of like, of being attacked. I mean fear of, of, I don't know if I can do it. Maybe I shouldn't do it. Maybe I should do this instead. I don't think that any great business, any Nobel Prize winner, any of those things came from a place of fear. All of those came from some place of personal power. And these decisions or the decisions that we have, they can completely change the course of our lives and the people's lives around us. And I'm not saying when I'm, when I'm, when I'm talking about this, I'm not saying that you have to change the world. I'm just saying that you have to change your life. These decisions of fear will make us play small. They will make us not live up to our potential. They will make us afraid of rejection. They will make us afraid of other people's opinions. They will make us afraid of what might happen if we step into the unknown. Those are all decisions that keep us playing small and they keep us taking the safe route and they keep us staying inside of our comfort zone. And you might be out there and you might have this amazing business idea that could completely change your life and maybe change the course of history. And it's out there and you have this idea and it's there and it's so close, but there's a feeling inside of your head of like, well, what if I, what if I mess up? What if I, what if I make an embarrassment of myself? What if I make an embarrassment of my family? And those thoughts will keep you from changing the world. Now let's go on even, even smaller scale. Maybe you have this feeling of you want to go start a business and you're not sure what the business is, but you have this feeling of I want to go start a business, but the fear is actually even keeping you from going out and trying new things. It's keeping you from going out and going to conferences that interest you to see what you can find out. That fear, if you didn't have it, could get you to start your, if you didn't have it and you started to a place of power, you could go out and you could learn something new. You could start a business and maybe that business doesn't change the course of history, maybe it doesn't change the world, but maybe it changes your life. And if you have kids or you haven't a spouse or you plan on having kids and spouse later on down the road, that will change their world. And so it's not about changing the entire world, but can you change your world, which will eventually change other people's world as well. It's also another thing of like stepping into, you know, your own personal development and investing into that. I always talk about it all the time. One of the biggest moments of my life was when I invested into my first coach and paid $500 a month. I could have not paid him $500 a month because I didn't have it because I didn't. I put it on to a credit card, but there was something inside of me that said I should do it. And now it was me stepping into a place of personal power going, you know what? I don't like where I am. I don't want to be here anymore.  And I'm going to do something different. That thought, that feeling completely changed the course of my life. And I wouldn't be doing what I do right now. I wouldn't be speaking to you, whether this is through a podcast, whether this is through YouTube or whether it's through Facebook or Instagram. I would not be speaking to you right now if I didn't hire that guy. I'm not changed my life and hopefully it's changing your life in some sort of way as well. You know, how many, how many great decisions came from a place of no risk? Oh, I'm not going to risk it. Here's the thing in life. This one of my favorite quotes, if you don't risk anything, you risk everything.  You risk an amazing life. You risk all the happiness and joy and the true potential and the wealth that you could get and the way that you could change your family's life by that wealth.  How many people do you look up to in your life? Amazing people that change the world that do you think just didn't live in their personal power? Very few, right? Probably none. How many great inventions and companies came from a place of fear? None. So what should we be focused on? We talked a lot about fear. What should we be focused on? As we should be focused on our personal power, stepping into a place where we know it's going to cause a great growth, greatest growth for ourselves. Is it going to be easy? No. Is it going to be uncomfortable? Yes. But is it going to help us grow? Absolutely. So that is what we need to be focused on. Stepping into who you could be and ultimately who you should be more than anything else. Will there be a risk? Absolutely. There's going to be tons of risks. There's going to be tons of failures. There's going to be a lot of stuff. But that doesn't matter. What matters is who you come out on the other side.   And that is to keep you safe.  It's what it does.  But your gut feeling is that feeling deep down inside of your soul of like, I feel like I'm supposed to do this. And the tragedy of life is that too many people don't listen to that gut feeling and they don't step into their personal power. They don't step into who they could be. They don't step into the true potential and then ultimately they get to end their life and they really regret that they didn't do what they ultimately should have done. They listen to fear more than they listen to their personal power. Everything that you want to do is going to require you to at some point step into a place of personal power and you need to become very aware of when your gut feeling is pulling you towards something when it's driving you towards something or when you are coiling back and you're coming from a place of fear and you're not making that decision. And once again I said this a minute ago it's going to require you to become very very self aware of what's going on and that's the first thing that you need to realize is that you need to become self aware whatever you feel a certain way to take a step back get out of the jar so you can read the label you know literally look at yourself as if you're a different person take out a pen and paper and say what am I feeling right now? You know what I'm feeling pretty fearful. Okay. Why am I feeling fearful fear? Why am I feeling fearful right now? I'm feeling fearful because I feel like I don't want to work at my job anymore and I want to go start a business. Okay. Why does that scare me? Write down all the reasons why it scares you. It's okay to write down all the reasons why it scares you and then you can also write down but what if I succeed what will happen? Oh I can have this I can have this I could create this I can impact these people's lives I could start a charity I can have so much money to donate and you start to realize when you take everything out of your head and you put onto a piece of paper that you could coil away you could listen to the fear but then you could fast forward 20 years from now and see what your life would look like if you decided to follow that route. So you ask yourself the question what would my life look like if I decided to not do this 20 years from now if I fast forward what will my my life look like if I don't do this I'll probably be in the same position making a little bit more money I'll probably not be as happy as I could be in fact I'll probably be less happy because I know that I'm not enough to my full potential. Okay.  But if I do fast forward of what my life could be like in 20 years what could my life look like. Oh my gosh I could impact these people I could change my life I could feel better of myself to finally feel confident of what it is that I do.    Why isn't any different with planning out where your life is going. If you're thinking about your life too much you're going down the wrong route. You need to start planning out your life act like it's a business. OK what if I do decide to go out and take this path in my life what can my life look like what challenges could come up if I go this route. What could I do to make sure that I mitigate the risk with all of these challenges. So therefore I can work through them. What if my mom does say this about me. Well she does say it about me that's her own opinion but I'm going to go through this route because it feels like it's what I'm supposed to be. So that's the first thing is become very self aware to take yourself out of the jar and read the label to put everything that's happening your head on a piece of paper and work through them as if it was a business plan. And the second thing is to start becoming comfortable living on the edge of your comfort zone. If you've never lived on the edge of your comfort zone before then it's going to be hard for you in the beginning. But once you've done this enough it feels uncomfortable instead of it instead of it feeling uncomfortable to live on your comfort zone it feels uncomfortable to not be uncomfortable. If that makes sense. Where comfort actually is uncomfortable because you know that it's not what you should be doing. You know that it's holding you back. You know that it's not giving you the life that you want. And so what you do is you actually start to find the edge of your comfort zone and you start to know what that feels like. You know what the fear popping up feels like but you decide not to listen to it and what you do when you get to the edge of your comfort zone instead of backing away as you start to lean in and go this is showing me where I am not free. I am stuck in this comfort zone and if I want to create something amazing in my life I'm going to have to lean into this just a little bit.  If you continue to make decisions out of fear for the next five years what is your life going to look like in five years. If you continue to make decisions out of fear over the next 20 years what is your life going to look like in 20 years.  I'm so proud of it. My children are going to be so proud of me that the life that I lived in fear for the past 20 years. What would your life look like if you lived in fear for the next five years for the next 20 years. Fast forward yourself and see it and if it's painful let it be painful because sometimes that pain is needed for you to make a change. And then what I want you to do is I want you to start to write down what could my life look like if I stepped into my personal power for the next five years. What could my life look like if I stepped into my personal power for the next 20 years. If I leaned on the edge of my comfort zone and I pushed past it constantly and push past it constantly and I felt the fear but I did it anyways. What could my life look like and you start to plan ahead and you start to realize that if you're going to step into your own personal power you've got to learn to work with fear. Fear is always going to be present. It's always going to be there. It's never going to go away. You just become more comfortable with it being there. It's just like that awkward person sitting in the corner of the room. It's always going to be there but just because he's talking to you doesn't mean that you have to listen to him. You can put on your headphones and start going to the path that you want to. So if you want to create a life that steps into your personal power you've got to start following it. You've got to start planning it out. You've got to become very aware when you're starting to be pulled back into fear and then just like a business plan right out what's going on and how you can get past it.  When you get to that deathbed you'll be proud of what you created versus not happy about what it ended up looking like. Hey thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to learn even more about master your mind click right here and watch this video as well. Like what is actually scary about that?