If school walls could talk: A mixed-method study of physical space marking in promoting multiculturalism

Abstract

Combining two qualitative and a quantitative method, we explored whether school’s physical environment promotes multicultural values or reflects intergroup climate in two multiethnic communities in Croatia. Croatia offers unique context for this study because minority youth from two ethnic groups use their right on minority language education and hence attend separate minority schools. Results show that the representation of ethnic symbols in schools is a reflection of inter-ethnic relations in the specific intergroup context. Specifically, ethnic symbols are overrepresented in the post-conflict context compared to the more harmonious multi-ethnic community. In harmonious intergroup context, multiculturality is promoted by emphasizing common identity, and by giving space to symbols of both minority and majority group. However, in the conflicted intergroup setting we found overrepresentation of symbols emphasizing intergroup differences. Results of focus groups as well as of the quantitative survey confirm that schools physical environment reflects intergroup relations in each community.

[Retracted] The Innovative Trend of Piano Teaching in Music Education in Multicultural Education under Ecological Environment

“…Its recognition process mainly includes stroke data acquisition, data preprocessing, line element classification (from coarse classification to fine classification), and finally the regularization of line elements, that is, fitting. The first is the digital description of strokes [ 17 ]. The collected stroke trajectories are stored in the designed data structure according to certain rules.…”

How Do Children Learn Social Categorization and Intergroup Attitudes When They Grow Up in Divided Contexts?

“…Indeed, growing up in communities that primarily expose children to one side of the divide and a particular ethos-such as display of flags or murals-may have an impact on children's developing foundations of their identities (Connolly et al 2009). For instance, work in similar contexts like Croatia showed that in more conflict-affected schools tend to over-represent group symbols that emphasize differences, whereas in more harmonious intergroup settings higher emphasis was put on the shared identities and symbols (Jelić et al 2022). For Kosovo's segregated context we found that the preference for the presented ethnic symbols is more pronounced for the Serb (minority) children, who show stronger preferences for ethnic symbols than Kosovar Albanian (majority) do.…”