Conference Agenda

The Roma people were recognised as a distinct ethnic group by the United Nations in 1979, followed by the emergence of international Roma organisations. A growing awareness of discrimination against the Roma has been observed and Roma-related issues have increasingly been raised in international organisations such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the Council of Europe. The Roma ethnic group deliberately chooses isolation to preserve its identity, as a way of distancing itself from the outside world. The closed lifestyle of Roma results in their social exclusion, which causes social (unemployment, housing, poverty, health) and educational (adult illiteracy, low education of Roma, children’s learning and education) problems and is an obstacle to the successful socialisation of Roma children.

The goal of the research is to disclose the factors that determine the problems related to Roma children education.

The following question is formulated: What factors predetermine educational problems for Roma pupils and can the challenges of educating Roma pupils be attributed to gaps in the national education system, a lack of interdepartmental coordination, or a lack of teacher competency?

Roma education faces the same problems almost everywhere in Europe (EU Roma strategic framework for equality, inclusion, and participation, 2020). In Lithuania (Baršauskienė, Leliūgienė, Pauliukonis 2003, Štuopytė, 2008), as well as in other countries (Kozma, Pusztai, Torkos, 2003), the most serious socio-educational problems of Roma people have been highlighted so far, which include illiteracy in adulthood, unemployment, poverty, bad living conditions, poor health, and the lack of cross-cultural education of children, which is manifested in low motivation for schooling, absenteeism, and low academic performance, and in early school dropout.

The comparison of something pedagogical in multilingual contexts to reflect and understand literary teaching and learning is still fraught with difficulties because the meaning of teaching and learning to write and read and its scope for setting object have also changed (cf. New London Group 2000). The similarity can also be observed in the field of qualitative research with narrative interviews in a foreign language and their translation process to understand what we can make possible for (re)reading and (re)writing. The focus of this paper is therefore on whether and how it is possible to approach the (re)reading and (re)writing of textual content from narrative interviews in a foreign language methodologically in order to reflect something pedagogical in multilingual contexts.

Scholars in German-speaking countries have been concerned with changes in pedagogical vocabulary. Nowadays, they tend to do so by analysing, and interpreting the process by which something pedagogical emerges from the actions, interactions, and cultural conditions of individuals. In doing so, they distinguish two German concepts of education (e.g. Koller: 2022, Nohl: 2022), from other concepts and practises in order to (re)read and (re)write the pedagogical by comparing it with social conditions and interactions. And on this basis, it seeks to (re)read and (re)write the uniqueness of pedagogy as distinct from other disciplines (cf. Liesner and Lohmann: 2010). Both in intercultural pedagogy and in qualitative educational research, the above-mentioned perspectives are combined with language and migration as the objects of analysis. This is done not only to examine how pedagogy is (re)readable and (re)writable, but also to provide new pedagogical perspectives on multilingualism (cf. Gogolin and Duarte: 2018, Krüger-Potratz: 2018).

Meanwhile, scholars of intercultural education outside the German-speaking world have pointed to the difficulty of developing different ways of doing intercultural research. One of the main reasons for this difficulty stems from the different interests by researcher's backgrounds for choosing a research topic, concept and method (Bhatti and Leeman: 2011). Moreover, this problem is clarified through methodological reflection on the relevance of narrative interviews as an approach for analysing and interpreting their structures in the context of migration and languages. Despite the great interest in qualitative research with foreign or multilingual narrative interviews (Hangertner: 2012, Temple and Edwards: 2002, Tempel:2008), research process of a narrative interview in a foreign language viewed from its translating in transcription is still unclear.

For this purpose, a narrative interview with a Japanese person was chosen as the source of data. In 2020, when I conducted my interviews, my interviewee was a regular international student at a German university. A transcription of the interview with her is presented in the original (Japanese) and translated into English. In order to consider the methodological reflection on the relevance of narrative interviews for the analysis and interpretation of their structures in the context of migration in multilingualism, I translated the original into English using the formulating interpretation according to the documentary and narrative structure analysis by Nohl (2006/2012). I then attempted to reflect on the translated sentences using Fritz Schütze's 'narrator's interest constellations'. While formulating interpretation and narrator's interest constellations are methodologically compared to narrative structures (cf. Franz and Griese: 2010), the discussion of foreign languages and their translation by researchers is not yet sufficiently developed (cf. Bittner and Günther: 2012). This kind of interpretation can show that the translation process should also be reflected in the analysis and interpretation of the narrative structure in interlingual storytelling.

Combined with a discussion of the methodological relevance of narrative interviews in foreign languages in intercultural education, this study provides important insights into the potential for developing a multi-literacy pedagogy.