Abstract:

The article presents the results of a 2021–2022 study on the barriers to learning faced by the students in an all-Roma village school in Bulgaria. We start with the view that social exclusion in education on the basis of ethnicity and poverty is still a real social fact even after the Decade of Roma Inclusion Decade and the ideology of ‘inclusive education’ shared by all Bulgarian institutions in the first quarter of the 21st century. The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the organization of the education process additionally impede the resolving of existing problems in the inclusion of socially vulnerable groups into the school, public, social, economic, and cultural life in the country. As far as one of the imperatives of our time is ‘Diversity in unity and unity in diversity’, cultivating it must take place also in the education system by the interaction of students with peers and teachers and by an equal start of children from minority and marginalized groups. The main question of the study is how going beyond the understanding of ‘exclusion from within’ (Bourdieu et al. 1999) is possible, i.e. the question of bicultural reaction in the interaction between teachers and students in schools where students are predominantly Roma.

Methodology:
The objects of study through qualitative methodology are the barriers of access and social vulnerability of the ethnically different children in the Georgi Stoykov Rakovski Primary School in the village of Galabets, municipality of Pomorie, region of Bourgas. The study was carried out through participant observation of everyday school life and the interactions between teachers and students as unfolded in the education process, as well as the communication out of class and in different forms of extracurricular activities. Participant observation has encompassed 89 students in the primary and secondary stages of study (II – VII form), 15 pedagogical specialists, the director, the deputy director, and the educational mediator of the school.

Results and conclusions:
We could say preliminarily that in the so-called Roma schools that we observe in the Bulgarian social space – usually in small communities and mostly in villages with a predominant Roma population – the interaction between teachers and students in the educational process and the informal communication between them is still done by ethnomethods (see Garfinkel 1967) based on the implicit establishment of inter-ethnic distance. Overcoming the ‘symbolic’ distance between Bulgarian teachers and Roma students is possible through empathic attunement and predisposition for ‘understanding’ (Bourdieu et al. 1999) of the students’ ethnic specifics and taking them into account. The practical dimension of overcoming the symbolic distance is in initiating different forms of extracurricular group creative and socially engaged activities, empathic inclusion, shortening the physical distance, bodily and emotional proximity, etc. as key factors for the successful transition through the different stages of socializations and inclusion and overcoming the bicultural reaction. This is how it’s possible to create an additional dimension in what is usually called ‘teacher’s authority’, turning the teacher into a base model of imitation, furthering the creation of ‘unity in the diversity’ and the formation of active young people and supporting teachers.

Keywords:

‘excluded from within’, barriers to learning, ethnicity, social exclusion in education, overcoming prejudice and stereotypes, empathy, inclusion in and through education, supporting teachers.