NaDiRa short study: Antiziganism at school

Project team:

• Sauro Civitillo
• Francesca Ialuna
• Philipp Jugert

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Project description:

Are Roma discriminated against in school and if so, on what grounds? To answer these questions, we investigated how student teachers think about the minority and how they evaluate students who belong to it. For our study, we surveyed over 200 student teachers from different universities in Germany online.

*Infrahumanisation is a form of discrimination in which a group is denied certain capacities of sentience. It is often based on common racist stereotypes that characterise this group as "uncivilised".

The participants were asked to give their recommendation for a secondary school for a total of 22 different, male student profiles. The student profiles differed only in terms of names and ethnic self-identification as Roma, Turkish, German-Turkish or German. Notably, the achievement profiles between the groups were identical on average.

The student teachers recommended the Roma profiles most often for the Hauptschule, followed by the profiles of students of Turkish origin and students without migration history. On the other hand, pupils without a migration history were most often recommended for grammar school, followed by those of Turkish origin and Roma. These recommendation patterns indicate discrimination against Roma and, to a lesser extent, against ethnic Turks compared to pupils without a migration history.

In order to understand the causes of discrimination, we also analysed the extent to which infrahumanisation and prejudice are related to the tendency to give Roma and people of Turkish origin worse educational recommendations than pupils without a migration history. We found a link between affective prejudice and discrimination: student teachers who indicated on our "feeling thermometer" that they had less "warm" feelings towards Roma*nja were also more likely to discriminate against Roma pupils in educational recommendations. 

Surprising insights:

When we examined the psychological drivers of discrimination by teachers, we found that, contrary to our hypothesis, infrahumanisation of Roma and people of Turkish origin can only explain an insignificant proportion of discrimination. Instead, affective biases can explain discrimination significantly better.

Relevance for practice:

Educational recommendations are of central importance for the further educational path and career success of students. In order to prevent discrimination against pupils with a migration history and BPIoC pupils at this important point, university teacher training must deal more with educational justice in a migration society. Existing curricula should urgently be examined for their effectiveness in this regard.

Short studies in preparation for the racism monitor:

In order to prepare a comprehensive racism monitor, DeZIM called on academics from the DeZIM research community in 2020 to develop innovative study ideas. These should extend existing research projects, pursue new and innovative approaches or build an infrastructure to research racism. By 2021, more than 120 researchers at the six locations of the DeZIM research community had conducted a total of 34 short studies. These are divided into six thematic priorities:

• Health system
• Education system and labour market
• Institutional racism
• Dealing with experiences of racism
• Participation and the media
• Racist ideologies and attitudes