Constructing responses to foreign students' experiences of discrimination: a service-learning project

Abstract

This article presents the results of a service-learning project, developed over two academic years, which involved foreign adolescent students who had recently migrated to Spain and postgraduate students from the University of Oviedo. The persistence of stereotyped images about immigrants (including adolescents) led us to design an anti-discrimination and intercultural intervention based on the following pedagogical principles: intercultural communication, giving students a voice, learning by doing and using the arts as a pedagogical tool. The methodology was developed over several phases working with classroom activities aimed at questioning stereotypes and discriminatory situations, as well as helping foreign students to construct responses to these situations. Among the results of the project, we can point out that both groups of students increased their communicative competence and empathy, improved their intercultural competence and reported a high degree of satisfaction regarding the service-learning experience. In the conclusions, potentialities and challenges of the methodology are analysed