Segregated Schools: What and Why They Are, and the Teachers Working in Them – A Needs Analysis in Southern Spain

Conference: The European Conference on Language Learning (ECLL2022)
Title: Segregated Schools: What and Why They Are, and the Teachers Working in Them – A Needs Analysis in Southern Spain
Stream: Professional development
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Yiyi Lopez Gandara, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
Macarena Navarro Pablo, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain

Abstract:

As teacher trainers working with pre-service trainee teachers at University and in-service teachers in schools in Andalucía we have encountered the reality of segregated or "ghetto" schools (Anyon, 1997) in most urban areas. While segregated schools are a structural problem that must be tackled structurally, this is a reality that teachers face on a daily basis, and that has devastating effects on them: in their Practicum module, our students report that they feel unprepared to use what they have learned in a real classroom setting, while teachers question their own capacity as educators and the career choices they have made. In view of this, we set out to research what segregated schools there are in Andalucía, their history and contextual determinants and the teachers that work in them in order to shed light on this often neglected area of educational studies. To do so, we used a mixed-method design to carry out a needs analysis (Pérez-Cañado, 2017) in eight “intensely segregated” minoritised primary schools in Andalucía (i.e. schools enrolling between 90% to 100% of students from minoritised groups) (Frankenberg et al., 2019). From a more global or structural perspective, results point to the need to rethink school catchment areas and raise awareness of the existence of school segregation at the European, national and regional level. From the point of view of teacher training, results indicate that further pre-service and in-service training is needed, including courses on alternative teaching methods, class and race sensitivity, linguistic and cultural mediation and intercultural liaising.

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