Isabel Fonseca teaches in Portugal. In this article she describes the challenges she faces while teaching European citizenship to students with different cultural backgrounds. She concludes that citizenship starts inside each one of us and it is based on social rules, tolerance and cooperation.
I've been teaching at my present school for four years now. It's really a multiethnic place, where about 80% of the students are of black race (from different Portuguese ex-colonies in Africa), gipsies and of course, with a small minory of caucasians.
When I started teaching there four years ago, I felt very enthusiastic about enrolling school into the Spring of Europe, which I did. For some months I tried to motivate the students into that theme and conducted many lessons into exploring Europe's different countries and traditions, which they did almost in a forced way, and not through an intrinsic will or curiosity to learn more.
At the end of our joint work, it's not that I felt it had been a waste of time, but I did feel that I had been the only really motivated person in the all process. Their final works obeyed the structure we had designed but there no real personal ideas on Europe itself. I felt tremendously frustrated.
I realized then, it was very hard to teach and motivate these students because they didn't feel either motivated nor integrated. I also understood their lack of both was brought from home since their parents didn't feel integrated themselves in our country and neighbourhood. Many students didn't even have their basic needs fulfilled, such as food, hygiene or parent caring.
So I started worrying about the students' integration as a priority. Many of them showed they didn't know how to behave properly in the classroom, neither with their colleagues or teachers.
I launched a possibility of a Comenius Project in PartBase, called Motivation through Integration, and we were contacted by two schools looking for partnerships. Both projects were accepted and started in 2004-05, one called "Media, the key meeting point for everyone in the future" and the other one "Against Bullying, for the welfare of the pupils". This last one mostly suited our needs, in terms of changing the students' attitudes towards each other.
Through this project I've started a deep research on Bullying and we've been doing plenty of activities at school, which seem to be working for the better:
We've been launching questionnaires on how students behave with their colleagues, on how they feel about being bullied, on finding out what happens in the playground, on asking them how they would act if they were teachers..., all of this with the purpose of making them aware of themselves as individuals, as well as in their interaction within the school community.
We've interrupted school regular activities twice, for a couple of days, to give them the chance to be with teachers and colleagues of different ages in Anti-Bullying workshops, such as painting a playground wall, painting tiles, writing poetry, theatre, cooperation games, relaxation...
It's also our aim that they'll help defining an Anti-Bullying policy for our school, in order to show them that Citizenship starts inside each one of us and it is based on social rules, tolerance and cooperation.
I realized then, it was very hard to teach and motivate these students because they didn't feel either motivated nor integrated. I also understood their lack of both was brought from home since their parents didn't feel integrated themselves in our country and neighbourhood. Many students didn't even have their basic needs fulfilled, such as food, hygiene or parent caring.
