INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

The intellectual interest, which has motivated this research, was directed towards the specific educational problems of Islamic minority children in Bulgaria and other countries in the Balkans. The broader issue was the problematic situation of the Islamic minorities in the region (i.e. Turkish, Albanian, Roma-Moslem and Pomak, i.e. Slavonic-Moslem populations). They have specific difficulties in the cohabitation with the majority populations in the Balkan countries - in comparison with the Roma-Christian minority, and also with the smaller minorities. My intention was to study the specific educational problems of the children from Islamic minorities, i.e. to outline the “profile” of their educational needs. However, my first steps in the research revealed to me the importance of the narrow cohabitation of the Islamic minorities with other ethnic and religious communities in the target countries (Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece). This made me shift the focus of study towards the effects of cultural interaction on the educational needs. The problems of Islamic children at school are treated in the context of broader issues of intercultural education, with special emphasis on the complexity of the effects of cultural interactions.

Due to the negative development of interethnic relations in Macedonia this year, the international component of the research was postponed. The time was used to complete the sociological survey in Bulgaria. Depending on the political situation, the documentary research will be conducted in Greece and Macedonia in the second half of 2001.

1. INITIAL ASSUMPTIONS

1. General goal of intercultural education: harmonization of the relationships between/among cultural identities.
2. Means:

• General legitimization of cultural diversity (working against ethnocentrism and prejudice; raising of culture-awareness; improving the competence about the Others’ cultural customs and traditions, etc.)
• Specific methods of working with educational means on the concrete problems of cultural cohabitation. They might include issues of inter-religious dialogue (e.g. common features and problematic interactions of Christianity and Islam), issues of interactions between traditional and modern cultures (e.g. resolving problems, which ensue from the cohabitation at school of individualistic and collectivist, of low context and high context, etc. behavior), issues of communicational incommensurability (e.g. between the style of communication at school and at the student’s home), etc. There is a dilemma in this respect: to address the needs of the students, as determined by their belonging to one or another ethnic/religious community; or as determined by their environment in one or another concrete school (or even class), where ethnocultural diversity is present.

1. Theses of this research:

• Due to the complex ethnocultural relations in the Balkans, a generalizing methodology of addressing the needs of the students, as belonging to one or another ethnic or religious community, would be an unacceptable essentialization of the situation. Each concrete ethnic or religious group in the region is located in the “force field” between the poles of more than one pair of opposites: traditional – modern; rural – urban; religious - secular; living in mixed – living in homogeneous (or even ghetto) ethnocultural environment; etc. It is unrealistic to try to outline the “profile” of the needs of an ethnic or religious community as a whole, because the community exists as a cluster of subgroups, which are influenced to a different extent by the above mentioned factors.*
• An individualizing approach, adequate to the specific needs of each concrete “population” (school, class…) seems to be more appropriate to the situation.* The key difficulty for introducing such an approach is: how to apply a definite – self-consistent and reproducible – educational methodology to the immense variety of configurations of needs and capacities, specific for each concrete group of students.
• This difficulty can be overcome by:
• an analytical “diagnostics” of the educational needs of each concrete group of students (school, class), proceeding from the assumption that each such group is characterized by the same system of cultural parameters, but by a specific combination of values of these parameters* . The diagnostics would consist in finding out by empirical means (e.g. by a questionnaire) what the concrete values for the given group are of the cultural parameters, which as a system are common for all groups of students in the region.
• an application of an appropriate combination of educational materials, corresponding to the concrete needs of the group, identified by the diagnostic procedure. These educational materials will be selected (according to the needs of the group) from a larger collection (a resource package), compiled with regard of the system of cultural parameters, characteristic to one or another extent for every group.

1. Task of this research:

The parameters, along which the cultural differences are established within the research, are among the ones that according to our opinion should be used for diagnosing the specific educational needs of each concrete group of students with minority representation. However, it is not a task of this research to find out these needs themselves. I think that this should be achieved by a more comprehensive and representative survey. Actually, my main policy recommendation, if my assumption is confirmed by my empirical data, will be that such a survey is prepared and used on national level in Bulgaria for diagnosing the specific needs in the respect of cultural integration of the students from each culturally heterogeneous school in the country.

Consequently, the parameters, along which the cultural differences are established within this research, are only a part of the whole set, which, according to my view, should be used to find out the specific educational needs of the concrete groups of students – see the table in the theoretical model of the sociological survey.

This is the reason why only a small part of the parameters of cultural difference, that are outlined in the theoretical model of the survey* , are actually included in the questionnaire. The task of the latter is merely to check whether the cultural differences tend to be greater among the schools than among the ethnic and religious categories of students. If it is so, this would mean that the specific approaches of intercultural education to address the specific needs of minority students should be “tailored” according to the cultural configurations of the concrete schools and even classes, and not according to the cultural identities of the ethnic and religious categories of students as such.

The documentary research in Greece and Macedonia, that is to be carried out further, has the task of comparing the problems of the education of minority children in Bulgaria with the analogical ones in different national and cultural conditions. It is hoped that a comparative analysis in this respect might be helpful in eliminating the influence of accidental factors on the conclusions of the research.
 
 

1. THEORETICAL MODEL OF THE SURVEY

 

 
 
 
 
 

See Appendix 1
 
 

2. INTERVIEW MODEL

 

 
 
 
 
 

See Appendix 2
 
 

3. QUESTIONNAIRE

1. Parameters, along which cultural differences among the schools, on the one hand, and the ethnic and religious categories of students, on the other, are to be identified by the survey:

• Qualitative differences:

• Attitude to school (questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 – some of the questions are relevant to more than one type of differences)

• Worldview /especially position in the tradition – modernity frame of reference/ (4, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21)

• Claims for specific cultural presence in the school curricula (12, 13, 24)

- Quantitative differences:

• Level of coping with the school tasks (6, 7, 8, 9)

• Level of communication capacities (14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22)

1. Technical parameters of the survey:

Sliven region (South-East of Bulgaria) – one urban mixed school (Bulgarian and Roma children), one urban minority school* (ghetto type – Roma Christian and Roma-Moslem children), one rural minority school (Turkish village near the town of Sliven)

Shumen region (North-East of Bulgaria) - one urban mixed school (Bulgarian and Turkish children), one urban minority school (Roma and Turkish children, with some Bulgarians too), one rural minority school (Pomak, i.e. Bulgarian-Moslem village near the town of Shumen). Altogether 304 respondents.

Interviews with the teachers of all the classes that were included in the sample. The interviews preceded the field survey and the results of the interviews were used in the preparation of the questionnaire.

3. Limitations:

• Age problem: the diagnostics can be either too early (difficult communication because of low level of self-reflectivity of the respondents), or too late (after a certain age it is too late for intervention, because of the fixation of ethnocentric attitudes and of the alienation from school and from the mainstream culture of the minority children, besides - after IV grade the role of the teacher in Bulgarian schools changes. Instead of working almost entirely with one teacher, the class begins to work with several ones, none of them having special responsibility for the class). The most acceptable compromise for our survey – IV grade (age - about 11 years).
• Material resources: a) not all existing population configurations have been studied; b) not all relevant parameters of cultural difference. A representative survey would be the comprehensive one, which will be recommended, if the present hypothesis is confirmed.
• Socially desirable answers (especially in connection with school)
• Relative difficulty (only for this survey, which concerns the relative level of cultural difference) – the unclear identification of the Roma – also partially identifying themselves with Bulgarians and Turks

1. INTERVIEWS RESULTS

1. low qualification of most of the teachers – if as an evidence for this can be accepted their style of expression, that was manifest in the interviews, and also their ability to articulate and substantiate their statements.
2. low self-esteem and motivation of most of the teachers – the circumstance that they work with minority children was perceived by most of them as result of their failure to get a better job, and not as a professional challenge.
3. low criteria for the achievement of their students – even the teachers of the classes, where the most shocking inability of the students to communicate was manifest throughout the survey, were not concerned about the quality of their students’ work.
4. low level of material support of the schools – in general, but with special difficulties in the Roma neighborhood school

1. SURVEY RESULTS

• The answers of all the 10 relevant questions showed considerably greater cultural differences among the schools than among ethnicities and among religious groups – see Appendix 4. Of 36 answers altogether (the questions had from 6 to 2 optional answers), only one showed greater difference between ethnicities than among schools - to the question “What do you dream of” 28.2 % of the Bulgarian children and 51.4 % of the Turkish children answered that they dream of getting one or another profession (lawyer, doctor, singer…), which is a greater discrepancy than the biggest one among the schools (29 % in the ethnically mixed school in Sliven, and 44.4 % in the Turkish village school near the same town).

• Most important problems identified by the survey:
• the extreme lack of communicative capacities on the level of high culture among the ghetto Roma children (evidence – the difficulty with which they understood the survey questions; the primitive answers that they gave to most of the questions, e.g. to the question “What is friendship for you” most of them answered by pointing one or more names of friends of theirs).
• the inadequacy of the teachers in the minority schools – evidence – the fact that in the interviews they did not attract the attention to the almost total lack of communicative capacities of the ghetto Roma children – as if this is a normal state of affairs

• Unexpected result – absolutely no claims for changes in the curricula (questions 12, 13, 24). It seems that at this age the minority children do not see as a problem the lack of specific cultural presence of the minorities in the curricula and the insufficiency of mother tongue training.

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