Today’s visit included 1) a visit to Smysluplná škola, where we sat in on lessons as well as taught a lesson of our own and 2) a lecture by Anna Donovalová on discrimination against the Roma people in the Czech Republic.
Pictured above: Smysluplná škola. Fun fact–despite resembling a mansion, this building was designed to be a school. It’s hard to believe royalty never lived here!
School Visit
After breakfast at the hotel, we took the tram and metro to Smysluplná škola, a pre-primary and primary school in Karlín. The school, which dates back to the early 1900s, serves over 1,000 children from preschool through ninth grade. There, we had opportunities to observe lessons and teach our own.
We (Kayla and Cass) taught a lesson on idioms to a group of 9th graders. Our first class period, we ran a trivia-night style game, while the second class period had something closer to Family Feud. Both classes, we gave the students an English idiom and had them compete to puzzle out what they meant.
Some highlights:
- Learning that a lot of English idioms have Czech equivalents. For example, “breaking the ice” has a pretty direct translation, while “to kill two birds with one stone” is “to kill two flies with one swat.”
- Learning that several students knew the word “beef” (as in the slang synonym of “grudge”) but not the word “grudge,” which we used to explain the idiom “to have a chip on your shoulder.”
After our lessons, we got to sit in on some classes. Kayla observed a Czech class while Cass observed an IT class. Some of our classmates got to observe three different classes, as they didn’t teach their own. Kayla, a French major, is very sad she didn’t get to observe the French class due to schedules not lining up. Luckily, some classmates were kind enough to take notes for her.
Pictured above: Cass (left) and Kayla (right) hosting our idiom game. In the moment of this photograph, Kayla has just drawn out the idiom “to kill two birds with one stone.”
Lecture
After a tasty lunch near the school, we took the metro back to the CET center for a lecture on the Roma people by Anna Donovalová, a current PhD student in the faculty of education at Charles University (a university in Prague). While Donovalová’s primary area of study is gender (in)equality, she also became interested in the experiences of the Roma people when she learned from a colleague about the prejudice they have historically faced in the Czech education system. She first provided us with some context on the history of Roma people in the Czech Republic. We learned that the Roma people, who migrated from (probably) India to Czech territory around the 15th century, were met with an initial welcome; however, in centuries to follow, they faced eviction laws, persecution, extradition, and segregation throughout Europe. Roma people living in what is now Czechia were subjected to labor camps and then to concentration camps. During the Holocaust, ninety percent of the Czech Roma population were killed. More recently, toward the end of the 20th century, Roma people in Czechia experienced over a thousand racially-motivated attacks, with few of the attackers facing legal consequences.
Next, Donovalová went into a more specific presentation about inequalities in education. For years, Roma students have been disproportionately placed in “special schools,” which are separate schools for students with learning disabilities. However, in reality, most of them do not have a disability that would warrant this separation from their peers. Donovalová explained why this happens: the diagnostic assessments used to determine students’ intellectual abilities were based on a homogeneous Czech majority population and failed to take into consideration differences in Roma children’s cultural and social experiences. This segregation of Roma students into special schools was finally ruled an unlawful form of discrimination in 2007, but since then, little has been done to address the issue. Furthermore, over half of Roma children in the Czech Republic don’t complete secondary school, and less than one percent graduate from university. As one of our classmates pointed out, this can make it difficult for Roma children to see themselves represented in professions requiring high school and university degrees, which they might otherwise aspire to.
The key takeaway from the end of her presentation was a call for Czech society–especially the school system–to move from the current “Roma neutral approach,” which focuses on equality of treatment without regard for differences, to a “Roma sensitive approach,” which would encourage thoughtful consideration of individuals’ backgrounds in figuring out how best to support them. Donovalová credited her studies in gender inequality with teaching her this equality vs. equity framework, which she adapted to target inequities faced by Roma students in Czechia.
Overall Reflection
Today, we found new insight into the Czech school system through first-hand observation and learned more about structural inequality in the Czech Republic. Many of the people we have spoken to on this trip have talked around inequality and prejudice, some even denying its existence in the schooling system. Donovalová provided a refreshingly frank look into the truth of the matter, opening up new questions to ask ourselves about what we have learned and will learn going forward.