Greek Roma in Higher Education: Perceptions and Experiences of Educational Success

How Did the COVID-19 Pandemic and Digital Divide Impact Ciganos/Roma School Pathways?

“…Figure 2 frames the triangulated perception of the different participants about the most significant impacts of the pandemic on the educational pathways of Ciganos/Roma students in secondary education, showing a diversity of outlooks, organized into three axes of analysis: direct constraints in access and supervision of classes and school dynamics, indirect effects on student motivation, and a greater socioeconomic vulnerability, especially with respect to the socioeconomic difficulties and material conditions for scholastic purposes faced by these families. Identification of these different-level, but mutually interrelated, determinants of Ciganos/Roma educational achievement and/or continuity during the particular circumstances of COVID-19 reinforce the pertinence from already developed models on the overall context of the Ciganos/Roma education field (Abajo and Carrasco 2004;Bereményi and Carrasco 2017;Brüggemann 2014;Gamella 2011;Gofka 2016). Indeed, the factors constraining and facilitating Ciganos/Roma educational pathways specifically during the pandemic and digital learning also attained a variety of personal and social circumstances, where potential opposing forces between the families' socioeconomic conditions and the wider community or social level may particularly exacerbate several of their previously identified inequalities on school access and continuity.…”

“…Qualitative data collected during the pandemic and especially throughout the first lockdown in Portugal (6 weeks in 2020, March to May, when classroom lessons and other extracurricular activities were forcibly shut down) were mobilized. As detailed in the Introduction (Section 1), these sources of information include heterogeneous key actors with relevant roles in fostering better educational achievements among Ciganos/Roma students (Abajo and Carrasco 2004;Gamella 2011;Gofka 2016;Magano and Mendes 2021a) and will be detailed below. Particularly during the pandemic, 8 professionals from 6 Escolhas Projects in Northern Portugal were interviewed, the majority located in the Porto Metropolitan Area.…”

“…Just as in the youngsters' interview scripts, the ethnographic observation focused on different-level key factors that may influence Ciganos/Roma educational pathways (Gamella 2011;Gofka 2016;Magano and Mendes 2016), namely characteristics of household contexts and school-home routes, family and other significant relationships, identity construction, and study and learning habits. To maintain their spontaneous behaviors and discourses as much as possible, independently of the researcher's presence, the observations were systematically recorded in a field diary, but only at the end of each interaction.…”

“…The factors constraining and facilitating the educational continuity pathways of these youngsters could be numerous, dynamic, and interrelated. These motivations and factors have been studied throughout the last two decades in a European context, especially by (Abajo and Carrasco 2004;Bereményi and Carrasco 2017;Brüggemann 2014;Gamella 2011;and Gofka 2016). Overall, their models and propositions argued that the Roma/Ciganos educational achievement and continuity can be attained in a variety of personal and social circumstances, such as positive valuation of academic potentialities, not only individual, but also related to support from family, school, local and wider social community; and construction of a project of educational continuity, sustained by personal skills, economic resources, and significant reference models (Figure 1).…”

Roma Population in the Spanish Education System: Identifying Explanatory Frameworks and Research Gaps

“…The FSG has estimated their number in between 2 and 3% of the total Roma population (FSG 2013, 2019) but there is no way to calculate the margin of error of that estimate. The studies are also quite scant at the European level (Kende 2007;Pantea 2015;Garaz and Torotcoi 2017;Gkofa 2018) and non existent in the Americas. -There is not a single study on Roma professionals: quantitative figures, ethnographic studies, nothing.…”