DREAMS - Digital Education Among Roma Minorities in Schools • ALL DIGITAL

27 Sep DREAMS – Digital Education Among Roma Minorities in Schools

27 Sep, 2019

Posted at 15:36h in Basic digital skills, Digital Media Literacy, Past projects, Projects by Victoria Sanz

The DREAMS project aimed at fostering the social, civic and intercultural competences of Roma parents through digital education in order to promote their social inclusion and tackle discrimination in schools, segregation, racism, bullying or violence.

The idea was to strengthen the collaboration between schools and families to help Roma parents understand the problems their children face in schools, to learn and talk about their rights as parents in the school, to be listened and involved in school activities.

This was achieved through digital storytelling technique with low-skilled Roma parents. Digital storytelling was used to highlight a societal problem, the drop out of Roma children from schools, discrimination, segregation, lack of opportunities. Digital stories aimed to create empathy from the educational environment towards Roma children and will be calls for action to think about changes and pathways that help resolve these problems.

During the project, in each country involved, Roma parents learnt about how to tell and edit digital personal narratives based on a personal life experience as a digital illustration.

The project was based on exchange of adult education methodologies of involved countries. DREAMS was implemented in Romania, Bulgaria, and Belgium.

The Main activities were:

Training of trainers in February 2020
First pilot: the learners told story about the school issues of their children
Local events to show the stories – at least 10 for each country – to peers and family members. Some of them were affected due to the restrictions of COVID-19.
Digital stories were disseminated in social media and website
Meetings with the schools showing them the stories, with the possible involvement of the storytellers
Second pilot: Roma parents came together to evaluate the whole process making a digital story, with the possible involvement of teachers
A methodology was developed and elaborated into a toolkit for social workers, teachers and participants of the educational system
The toolkit is disseminated and discussed with interested social workers at four webinars
A final was planned to present and discuss the methodology and tools used in this process, however, due to the restrictions cause by the COVID-19 situation, the project coordinator produced this video instead: