Conference Agenda

Increasing linguistic diversity in education has brought renewed focus to persistent inequalities experienced by minority-language students. However, there is increasing scientific literature which identifies educational interventions that are effective in compensating for these inequalities, overcoming deterministic and deficit analyses in the understanding of the educational trajectories of minority-language students. Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme, this study is part of the research remit of the Revers-Ed project funded to identify trends in educational inequalities across Europe and provide scientific evidence of effective interventions that compensate and reverse them over time, with a particular emphasis on transferability and sustainability. Within this context, this paper reports on a systematic literature review that has a dual focus. On the one hand, the review exploits existing international research to map and analyse educational inequalities experienced by minority-language students from a longitudinal perspective, identifying key features and trends. On the other hand, the review also identifies effective interventions to redress these inequalities and considers how they can be translated into policies and replicated to work towards a more inclusive educational systems with better learning outcomes for all. Comparative insights from Ireland are also provided in order to illustrate how evidence-based interventions can promote greater equity.

The importance of considering the complexity of the language context for minority-language-speaking students was a key concern throughout, and focused on indigenous/ethnic-minority-language students (Do et al. 2020; Ja Htu et al. 2023; Nguyen and Ha 2023; Prem 2021); those who speak a minority language in the national context but the majority language in their region (Tang et al. 2016; Zhang 2020); bilingual contexts (From and Holm 2018; Ní Chlochasaigh et al. 2021); and immigrant/refugee minority-language students in host countries, which made up the majority of the studies in this review (Back 2020; Bermingham 2021; Dangping 2022; Karakolidis et al. 2021; Keskin et al. 2023; Kim 2022; Konig et al. 2021; Lindemann and Saar 2012; McGillicuddy and Machowska-Kosciak 2020; Schmaus 2022; Schutte and Miley 2023; Sprong and Skopek 2022).

This literature review addressed the following questions with respect to minority-language students:

• How were educational inequalities operationalised?
• What were the causes or contributing factors to educational inequalities?
• What were the effects/consequences of educational inequalities for students’ lives?
• What interventions were demonstrated to be effective in reducing inequalities?
• What characteristics do effective interventions have in common?

Following the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) framework, the review spans 2000–2023 and integrates evidence from 30 studies across diverse contexts, with a preference given to papers from the previous five years and included longitudinal and cohort studies.

The discussion section underscores the critical implications for policy and practice, advocating for language-inclusive education policies, decolonised curricula, and teacher capacity-building to ensure all students, regardless of home language, have equal opportunities to succeed.

In recent decades, the idea that educational inclusion can be the first step in the social inclusion of Roma has become established in the specialized literature and social-political practice. In this regard, significant progress has been recorded at the European level since the early 1990s. In its recommendation 1203/1993, the Council of Europe stressed the importance of ensuring quality education, the need to introduce intercultural education and supported the teaching of Roma history and culture in schools, as well as the training of teachers in this field. In the early 2000s, the Romanian Ministry of Education published Romani language and literature textbooks, as well as Romani language support materials for elementary and high school grades. Today The Romani language is recognized in the Romanian education system not only as a subject of study but also as a possible language of instruction, and the history and culture of the Roma, similar to the language and culture of other minorities, is an optional subject (Sarău, 2009).

In the education of Roma students, the adoption of effective educational strategies based on the use of cultural identity as an educational resource poses additional difficulties, since in their case cultural differences coincide and co-occur with marginality and socio-economic influences. In this context, teachers tend to interpret different cultural customs, norms and behaviors as shortcomings. The specialized literature (Marburger, Helbig & Kienast, 1997; Bender-Szymanski, 2000) has highlighted in this regard the pronounced presence of cultural ethnocentrism in teachers' narratives. Another frequently mentioned characteristic of teachers’ attitudes is “unconscious racism” (Ladson-Billings, 1994, p.31), when teachers tend to ignore the different cultural background of the students or their precarious social situation and adopt characteristic stereotypes, including the perception of unequal value. Regarding the education of Roma students, this conception reinforces the idea that these students should assimilate in order to succeed in school.

In contradiction to these views, the multiculturalist view argues that schools should adopt an inclusive curriculum that reflects the culture, language and history of the Roma (Bhopal & Myers, 2009). In order to implement culturally responsive teaching, knowledge of the culture, history and customs of the students is said to be essential (Gay, 2010). However, these are usually missing from national curricula (Kyuchukov, 2000), and most teachers do not have the necessary knowledge (Nikolaou, 2009). Without them, we can say that a school is not adequately prepared to meet the needs of Roma students (Miskovic, 2009). Teachers’ perceptions of “disinterested” and “distant” parents can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy and can negatively affect their expectations of students (Valdes, 1997). Even the best intentions of inclusive education policies are doomed to failure if they are not complemented by the elimination of discriminatory attitudes (Vincze & Harbula 2011, p.51).

Based on these premises, in our research conducted in a rural area of ​​Bihor County, we aimed to investigate the opportunities for using the Romani language and Roma culture in the educational process of Roma children, as well as the attitudes of teachers in this regard. Our investigation focused on the following aspects:

1. To what extent and how do teachers incorporate elements of Roma culture in their activities with students in and outside of school?

2. How frequent is the use of the Romani language in the family and at school and what other languages ​​do Roma students know/use?

3. What is the attitude of teachers regarding the potential benefits of using the Romani language and culture in educational activities?

4. What are the opportunities for learning and practicing in school songs, dances specific to Roma communities as well as songs/dances specific to other cultures?

Within the DAAD-funded project “Service Learning – Curtain Up! A Theatre Project to Foster Reading Literacy and Social Cohesion in Inclusive Learning Settings” (University of Potsdam, 2025), pre-service teachers from the University of Potsdam and the University of Education in Winneba (Ghana) are trained in reading research, theatre pedagogy, and scenic performance.We focused the research question: How can a transcontinental theatre project grounded in reconstructive case analysis be designed and implemented in higher education to foster inclusive teaching competencies among pre-service teachers?

The participants receive online lectures as well as individual mentoring to support the development of their own dramatic texts.The Potsdam Inclusive Didactic Teaching Model (Giera et al., 2025) provides the conceptual framework for planning and implementing the theatre project, which has been carried out in two cycles with German and Ghanaian pre-service teachers (2025–2026). The resulting collage of dramatic texts addresses experiences of exclusion and discrimination in schools and promotes communicative exchange as well as collaborative approaches to inclusive school development (Prengel, 2022).

Drawing on principles of scenic interpretation (Scheller, 2023) and reconstructive case analysis (Schmidt & Wittek, 2020), the students adopt the perspectives of actors involved in discrimination experiences they have personally encountered or observed. This biographical approach (Plath, 2009) offers significant potential for in-depth engagement with individual experiences, for recognising broader structural connections, for reflective distancing, and for creative self-reflection (Platz, 2009, p. 115). Self-reflexivity, as a core objective of reconstructive case analysis (Schmidt & Wittek, 2020, pp. 35–36), enables students to reflect on their own biographical imprints while temporarily adopting alternative perspectives and questioning habitual interpretive routines. This stance proves particularly suitable for addressing bullying and discrimination in educational contexts.

The strategic dramatization of the texts (Hippe, 2011, p. 185) renders them accessible for further reconstructive analysis. The resulting scenes form the basis for a comprehensive competence development among pre-service teachers of German at lower and upper secondary levels. Within this teaching–learning arrangement, students assume multiple professional roles as authors, actors, directors, and dramaturgs. They further develop the scenes collaboratively through creative writing processes and take responsibility for recording, editing, and sound design. In this way, they experience a transmedial expansion of and enhanced design competence in relation to their own written texts (Anders et al., 2019).

All produced materials are made available as Open Educational Resources (OER) on the digital learning platform OpenUP. Further project outcomes have been published in a bilingual German–English edited volume (Giera et al., 2026). This contribution demonstrates how the transcontinental theatre project was planned, implemented, reflected upon, and sustainably embedded in higher education. It also presents the dramatic scenes created through collective authorship (Giera et al., 2026), the themes negotiated on stage across national contexts, and the methods and media used by instructors to support the processes of writing, performance, and staging.

In addition, the paper provides insights into the competence areas fostered for use in school contexts, including literary, language, and media didactics in German language education (Anders et al., 2019), as well as interdisciplinary applications in English and civic education (Kahlert, 2022). Overall, the theatre project aims to develop a postdramatic performance, a video collage, and a multilingual theatre script in order to inspire pre-service teachers worldwide to engage with contemporary theatre through biographical and performative approaches.