CHILDREN-ARGENTINA: Poor Children Have Their Say

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 14 1999 (IPS) - The children of poor families in Argentina often suffer from a language barrier in the classroom where they are fearful of speaking out and expressing their emotions, a social study has revealed.

Girls and boys from poor families from 12 schools were involved in a lengthy study programme sponsored by the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) designed to encourage the children to “have their say”, and overcome the linguistic gap excluding them from the social system.

Social workers used a simple method to get the children to express themselves: reading stories that helped them open up to talk about their ideas, feelings, fears, joys and suffering.

“We wanted to find out the effects of language barriers on poor children trying to integrate into the system”, says a sociologist involved in the programme, the results of which will be published in April

The study began in 1995 and was coordinated by psychologist Silvia Schlemenson. It included schools in five provinces around the country, which serve preschool children (5 and 6 years old) from low-income families.

Through the reading of children’s stories in 20-minute sessions, the professionals brought children together with the spoken word, a tool that is capable of developing their narrative abilities and their capacity to reflect and think critically.

In the final evaluation, the professionals explained that many children from poor families speak very little, because they are busy working (taking care of brothers and sisters, cooking or working outside the home), causing them to have a poor vocabulary that limited their potential.

UNICEF sociologist Monica Rosenfeld explained in an interview that the concern is not about how they speak, but rather that they speak and “express themselves in words about their experiences and feelings, in order to prevent their exclusion”.

Studies had shown that poor girls and boys develop a “fearful language” – they are afraid of saying their name, they speak in a low voice or prefer to respond to teachers’ questions by speaking into a classmate’s ear.

“In addition to their economic disadvantages, children living in poverty tend to have language barriers”, says a report coordinated by Schlemenson. “From this perspective, we believe that language is a resource that is unequally distributed. It is important that girls and boys seize the spoken word.”

The latest programme’s methodology consisted of reading stories and motivating children to express themselves, as “a story is an emotional trigger of interest for the expression of opinions and thoughts.”

At first, some children responded with a nod, showed numbers with their fingers, or merely smiled. Others spoke their comments in a low voice or whispered in secret to their classmates.

The children were invited to associate the conflicts that they heard about in the story with their own life experiences. This, the study argues, is the best way of integrating them into the educational system: by rescuing and attributing value to their own experiences.

In that way, they were able to express that often they were victims of domestic violence or made to suffer their parents’ anguish if they were unemployed.

The method used consisted simply in encouraging them to “say” what bothered them the most, hurt them or gave them joy, at the same time that a story was told.

The researchers said that the goal was to encourage diversity of opinions, with special emphasis in those that were the strangest or the most disconcerting, to deal with the children with different realities and attempt to show a universe complex in experiences.

The authors stressed that in this way, personal experiences are enriched and it is possible to change the way one thinks and faces the world.

“When differences are stressed, it allows for the development of a greater capacity for reflection and for the emergence of critical thinking”, an element which the authors consider to be crucial for the social integration of these girls and boys from low-income families.

At the same time, the children lose the fear of expressing their desires, realities and anxieties. They are moved and transformed in the face of different experiences, and their point of view is heard; they recover their imagination and can dream about other experiences for their own lives.

“The absence of a space for them to express themselves, understand and reflect in an environment of respect towards what they say, condemns to silence a high percentage of children who could be integrated into the educational system in a more egalitarian way”, the study argues.

This kind of stimulation also reduces the chances that the children abandon school, and provides a bridge – perhaps the only one, according to researchers – between poor households and the socio-cultural system.