Promoting the Integration of Roma in and through Education

“My Beautiful School – a place where it is possible to be happy” intends to facilitate the access to education initiatives for children at the primary school level in order to reduce the drop-out rate and to raise the completion rate for Roma children attending school, motivating and empowering them.

With a dramatic similarity with the children living in the European rural areas in the first years of the XX century, the Roma children have not access to the formal education. The condition of the poor children living in the rural sides inspired an experience, nowadays still very actual and universally known as Montessori Method. This approach was experimented for the first time in Villa Montesca and was based on a very revolutionary idea: it’s the educative space that has to be adapted to the children and not the opposite.

The experiences carried out during different projects of inclusion of Roma in the educative system show that it is possible to re-think the Montessori and Hallgarten method to find proper tools to be easily adapted to the characteristics of the Roma children.

The project aims to overtake prejudices and cultural barriers which make less successful the integration of the Roma children in the formal education trough the development of a specific actualization of the Montessori-Hallgarten didactical approach. It intends to explore is to valorise two experiences apparently very different, but with some evident common point:

• the experience of the establishment of a cultural centre in the Vilnius Kirtimai Roma settlement: here gagè and Roma cultural activities are carry out with the aim to create a background of inclusion among the two communities;
• the traditional Montessori and Hallgarten approach for the personal development of the children.

This experience is still very actual and can be "actualized" to take into account the exigencies of the Roma children and their personal and cultural approaches. In these terms, it is possible to think how to adapt the proposed didactical approach to the social exigencies and dimensions of any group of people with any culture and living background.

The approach the project intends to experiment is based on the relationship between children and the environment and it is addressed to a personal and social development of the Roma children as a direct connection to the implementation of the social skills in a pre-scholar age. The relevance of the social skills is evident and the project intends to provide some points of reference to teachers and operators in order to give an overview about how to adapt the Montessori educative method to the cultural dimension of Roma communities in their different ethnic and social contexts.

Project objectives aims at

• exploiting the actual experience of the pre-scholar and primary Montessori-Hallgarten schools taking into account the consistence of the reciprocal prejudices existing among the gagè and the Roma communities and  verifying what can represent an effective barrier to the Roma schooling.
• creating a didactical method, realizing training experience for a group of volunteer teachers and learning opportunities for children at pre-scholar and primary level, especially involving girls, whose the approach is particularly addressed, because they represent the weakest target group. The method is not merely addressed  to the intellectual growth of the children but also to develop their social and personal basic skills such as caring the personal hygiene, caring the personal relationships with the others accepting their diversity, being able to  have current relationships with the external society.