 Good evening, everybody, and thank you all for coming. Welcome to the symposium about prejudices and education, the Elephant in the Classroom. This event is organized by Study Association Complex, Studium Generale, SPS NIP, and 50 Years of Psychology in Tilburg. For students of Tilburg University, this symposium does count for your Studium Generale Certificate, so see the website for more information. If you're interested in psychology, Studium Generale and 50 Years of Psychology in Tilburg will organize a lecture about animal and human emotions with Frans de Waal on the 30th of September, in Pope Podium 013. Secondly, SPS NIP regularly organizes lectures and workshops to shrink the gap between university and the work field, follow them on Facebook to stay up-to-date on their activities. Lastly, if you are a psychology student, you can become a member of Study Association Complex, which gives you the following benefits. You will get discounts on books, summaries and tutoring. We also organize a lot of interesting formal and informal events. By becoming a member, you will get to know your fellow students. We are very pleased that we get to address the important topic of prejudices and education with you and our experts tonight. For those who are watching the livestream, if you have any remarks or questions, you can ask them via the chat on YouTube. Your moderator for tonight will be Professor Ilje van Beest. He is the head of the Social Psychology Department and now I would like to give the word to Ilje van Beest to start the symposium. Welcome, everyone. My name is Ilje van Beest. I'm a professor of social psychology and when we talk about attitudes, strategies, stereotypes, that is something that is dear to my heart because the first thing that I want to share there is that when we talk about attitudes, about opinions, about people or objects, then prejudice is nothing more than an opinion that we have about a specific group. And one of the lessons learned, I think I find very important to share with our students, is that the opinion that we have about an individual or a group, does that actually also translate to behavior that we have towards that group? So if I believe that all full professors in Tobuque universities are stupid, is that then really the case? Well, obviously not, but do I behave in a specific way to those full professors because of my prejudice towards those full professors? And with that in mind, I would like to take you back, way, way, way back like about 100 years to the southern states of the United States of America and remember that that was an era in which prejudices, stereotypes were very expressed in society. So it was very normal, if you would say, those with another color are not like me. I don't want to be around with them, etc., etc., etc. And one of the studies that they then did by Lapierre in 1934 was that they asked a restaurant, would you allow a couple, a Chinese couple, into your establishment? And like I said, it was a bigoted society and they did what a proper restaurant would then say. So 94% of the restaurants indicated, no, we are a proper restaurant, we would not allow a Chinese couple into our restaurant. And this is, of course, horrible. But like I said, an attitude does not necessarily translate into behavior. So what they also did is that they then took a Chinese couple and they went to those restaurants. And maybe this is good news. Only 4% of the restaurants actually denied entrance to this Chinese couple. So what I want to say here a little bit is like, when we talk about prejudices, I think we also want to talk about the actual behavior that is associated with it. And maybe we can take comfort from the fact that that link between prejudices and stereotypes of discrimination need not be strong. And I gave the example, I think, in the positive direction, right? People are very prejudiced, but in reality, they were less discriminatory than you would anticipate. Sadly, it can also happen the other way around. And I in no way want to deny that we are today are going to talk about the elephant in the room, that if you are in any society and I talk about myself right now, I really know I'm a white male 49 years old. It doesn't get any better than this, although it has been challenged the last couple of years. So I am very much aware that if you are in a majority and then you are one of those minorities in that particular majority, that you face a very different reality. And I hope that we learn something today about what that means. The other thing that I want to say a little bit about social psychology is like, why do we have those prejudices then? And there are, I think, four reasons that come to mind. And one of the reasons is basically they steal my jobs. So one of the things out there is that people may have prejudices because they feel that somehow those of another type, color or whatever, they somehow steal something. So the words for me would be all those Polish full professors, they are stealing my jobs. And I know that most of you would probably know that that argument, although that may be a reason why we are prejudices, it's a completely false argument. Time after time after time, research indicates that actually by bringing in new perspectives and minorities, it increases the pie. So when there are more full professors from Poland into the Netherlands, it probably means there will be more students coming to the Netherlands and it will increase the pie and there will be more work for people. So that's one reason. The second reason is that it is somehow it makes us feel too long in a group. So the example that I would like to give then is the first time that I was in Tilburg and visited the soccer stadium here. You don't really know how to behave. And before I know it, the entire stadium started to sing. All knockers sign and you can fill it in. Basically, they said something very nasty about another soccer team. But if the entire stadium starts to shout that and sing that, it is very difficult not to also do that. So why do we engage in prejudices? Maybe it's also sometimes just because we want to belong in the particular group that we are. A third reason is maybe that it is about comparing yourself and increasing your own self-esteem. So the story that comes with that is apparently the exalted KKK leader in the United States was very prejudiced against African-Americans. And they kind of like asked them after some time like why and they kind of like found out that many of those individuals that are very prejudiced live in a very poor situation. So you are a white male of 49 years old and basically you haven't accomplished nothing. Then at least and that is a booster self-esteem you can make this claim but I'm not and whatever minority you then pick up. So prejudices sometimes also just stems from that people want to improve their own self-esteem at the cost of another group of individuals. Why do I think this is important to know? Because it also means that all these reasons that I can also be targeted changed and today I hope that with learning how we can change these things and just understanding them more we can also inoculate against the more negative effects that are really there. And having that said I would really like to give the floor to Mark Spotti our first speaker of today. Please give him a big hand. So I'll stay here see put my time on off we go. Well the first thing that I want to start with is to thank you for being here and to thank you for being on my talk without killing the desk and also saying that is the first time in about a year and a half that I've been having a live talk with so many people. It's lovely. Feels absolutely great and I'm terribly afraid. Anyway, setting it aside. So off we go. Well, here we are all the speakers beautiful pictures off we go to my toes zero lingual multilingual they're all beautiful languages but none of them are language really a little bit about my background. I do come from Italy. I moved in 99 to the UK. I got a degree from the UK as a primary school teacher of all things that somebody who's a foreigner can do and my feeling there was a feeling of being stereotyped quite a lot. You know, I was the pizza bakery men still and the most foreign person that was in college with me what I studied was somebody from Northern Ireland or somebody from Scotland. So you can imagine how different I felt when I was there after graduating I moved on to I moved into London and I became a supply teacher in very, very rough London school so rough that people would tell you look, this is break time. You have an alarm Knoppier that you can push on if things get too rough with the kids, you know it was a very, very rundown area and then you could see stereotypes all these people were less foreign than me they were born and bred in the UK they were going to school in the UK they would be living for the rest of their lives most likely in the UK but still they were considered to be foreigner you would have a black you would have the Afghani you would have a Paki you would have a Bangla and so forth and so forth so this idea of education education and stereotypes education and preconceived idea about the other was always there. Now, the beautiful thing about the Netherlands is that you don't pay for tuition fees when you do a PhD actually you get paid so I decided to move to the Netherlands to do a PhD which I did and the PhD was about was about developing identities so the development of identities of immigrant minority pupils in the Netherlands and Flanders and how do they are they perceived are they perceived as foreigners are they perceived as almost Dutch quasi Dutch Flemish, Belgian you know that kind of identity tricks that are being played into education and and and well do I have an answer to how they are perceived not really but you know here comes an example that hopefully will be will be interesting for you guys. Right, so what do we do tonight? We get acquainted with prototypical theory a little bit after which we look at the groundbreaking work of Jan Blomard and explore the concept of voice from a linguistic anthropological perspective we then look at some sociolinguistic hegemonic spaces and we conclude hopefully by even having a laugh which is very important when you give such a kind of talk. In sociolinguistics or better in linguistic anthropology if you look at a certain branch of linguistic anthropology you come to be confronted with theories about identity construction and identity construction is all about categorizing who's in front of you. We as human beings we categorize there is no human being that does not categorize that is categorization free and it is through categorization that we sort of establish who's alike us so A is A because A is not B. It is through categorization that we either affirm or disconfirm our identity and yes even though you're not aware of it most likely you're doing it either right now by wondering is the guy talking a good speaker really or is he a bit of a dodgy one. And one interesting study that really I thought it was illuminating when I started when I started getting acquainted with these topics was birdie birds or bubbles or simply birds from Atchison in 2001 and she was asking the question when thinking of the most noble of birds which bird does come to your mind? Who on? Pardon? You don't know the English Kingfisher? Okay and now you get the most difficult question why is there so beautiful colors so you go for the visuality right anybody else with another yeah please yeah a stork okay and now give us the rationale right it's pretty majestic so you know bodily posture of a bird and so forth and so forth right so the study said if people in England would have been asked then the vast majority of them would have been saying a robin other people would have been mentioning you know on the basis of colors and so forth and so forth other people would have been mentioning a rudder you know nicer straightforward eagle off we go and the third one in particular people belonging to Bangladeshi minority would have mentioned a peacock that being a national symbol for them but also on the basis of the color right so here we go they're all birds they're all animals but fundamentally we are inclined culturally speaking to give them certain kind of characteristics either because they are colorful or because they are noble or because they are bodily or because they are associated with an imagined community that of the Bangalore nation so to say still venturing in the field of sociolinguistics slash linguistic anthropology then you get to encounter my hero James G 1999 a discourse analyst discourse analyst which has been very influential for my work my work is there that's identity in development and fundamentally James G next to giving a technique on how to do discourse analysis talks about discourse models schemata through which we produce language and with that language we talk about the people around us the animal around us the world around us and so forth so far so good okay so and James G says well there are universal discourse models you know the good is up there in the sky and the bad is down here below paradise hell the cross cultural here we do it like that there we do people do it differently and the monocultural look here we do it like that like the first time when I moved to in the Netherlands I was living in a student house and it was very cold here in the Netherlands in August I mean for my standards I was making some soup and a guy turned out and he said hey Ahmed which by the way my name we are in the Netherlands and we visit in the winter not in the summer to which my reply was where is summer you know that's as far as it goes it's all a matter of meaning making isn't it in life anyway all these models contribute to the construction of what James G terms ideological schemata of indexicalization that we verbalize in our daily language use when we refer to other people or to everything that surrounds us pardon me now we go off to language is language important well from a sociolinguistic, linguistic anthropological point of view of course language is important otherwise me and my colleague wouldn't have a job but it's important because the point of departure in the study of language in society is that language in whichever form and through whichever channels is constantly present in the daily lives of human beings and we all use language and we all have an idea about language we are all being taught what is good language versus what is bad language we have been taught what is good spelling we have been taught what is good pronunciation we have been taught what you should be saying when you are giving a lecture what kind of variety of Dutch you should be using of English and so forth and what you should be using with other people anyway so if we enter the field of sociolinguistics and we start trying to analyze language from an ideological point of view then we are confronted with four aspects that we should be analyzing one of them is form one of them is used the other is ideology and the other again is the main in other words who speaks which language to whom where, when and why that's the big sociolinguistic driving question and now we come to the concept of voice which I came to understand tonight that in your field means something rather different but from a linguistic anthropological perspective voice is rather straightforward it comes from the work of Del Himes rather famous in anthropology in the US has been re-adapted by Jan Blomart and he goes on to this, the capacity to understand and of someone to make him or herself understood in a sociocultural space so so far so good with boring theories now let's get cracking to one more thing language use so whichever bit of language that we use and here comes into play the micro politics of language and the micro politics of identity which have a bit of language that we use even an accent what is in an accent in an accent for instance is where you come from one of the first thing that I came to understand in this country was the Zachter G versus the Arde G which fundamentally it calls up for all sorts of values it calls up for geographical positioning of people it calls up for images of Randstad versus images of Plotland and so forth and so forth so you see even in an accent even in a way in which we utter a certain phoneme we find identity so here we go, language use is normative in a connotational sense it is subject to what we call metapragmatic evaluations which all refer to an institutional center of practice that is how something should be said, written and done language use performed or perceived situates the speaker on the continuum of either within or outside a given schemata a given discourse model a given prototype the piece of research that I want to show you is called zero-lingual multilingual and why am I, well let's give it a bit of a setting after you finish your PhD you're desperate for a new idea and for new hunches where to do your research and one idea that came to mind was okay let's go and have a look let's go and live like anthropologists do in an asylum seeking center this time in Flanders there was the one I found in the middle of nowhere very far away from here and in that time there was 2013 there was a policy issued by the Flemish government saying the multilingual pupils well it wasn't a policy it was an interview in which the family Flemish minister of education said well multilingualism is equal to zero-lingualism basically so the most important thing is Dutch right what happens in an asylum seeking center all sorts of things this was a red cross asylum seeking center which means that it's not a prison like place it's more you know free people get taught Dutch get taught different skills they can come in and out of the asylum seeking center up to the point that they leave their documents there or whatever documents they have and anyway it was a nice lovely community to observe and to investigate I was made part of this asylum seeking center and in this asylum seeking center the red cross allowed people to attend Dutch as a second language classes the class as you can see is huge why because people could come in and out you know it was open to people not everybody attended but everybody was very welcome a gigantic background in terms of nationality in terms of languages in terms of scripts in terms of levels of education in terms of levels of literacy we were ranging from people with a university degree to people with being barely literate they barely would have been to school to people that would consider themselves literate because they've been to Quranic schools so they knew how to read classical Arabic they knew how to read the Quran but once confronted with modern Arabic for instance their literacy skills would be rather crumbling down now one of the things that I did inspired of course by the work of Joshua Fishman was to carry out a sociolinguistic survey so what kind of languages do we find in this asylum seeking center but in particular how do the speakers of these languages call their languages and as you can see there are certain languages that have been called in different names some of them address them as French other are Frances other again very interesting Frances du Congo if we look at for instance another interesting one Mandinka which then takes the play the name of Mandingo which then takes the name of Malinka they're all referring to the same kind of language but from where they come from it takes a slightly different name another thing that was rather clear in that classroom that I was examining was that there are not just different languages but also there are different scripts different alphabets so the Latin alphabet the Cyrillic alphabet the Arabic alphabet people who claim to have no alphabet in their own languages so they scribbled something people who didn't know what an alphabet is or was but also we came across for instance the Bengali alphabet and the Urdu signs so you see a large array of sociolinguistic resources both in terms of languages but also in terms of scripts the teacher the teacher was a very lovely lady who had retired she had been a primary school teacher she has been teaching Dutch as a second language for the past 12 years there at the center she came into the center once a week she has been to Africa once for holidays and she came that she had a wide knowledge of Africa in an interview that we carried out together she has a limited proficiency of English and the funny thing is that she has learned English mostly by working with the residents at the center so all of a sudden there is this opposite situation where is the teacher taking on board English language skills while being taught by the residents there we are in a very specific chronotope what do I mean by chronotope in a very specific policy time frame compression the issue of being zero lingual if you are multilingual just came out in 2013 it was very odd and very debated in Flanders and it was passed down to all asylum seeking centers because the idea behind it is that guys you should be preparing your residents for once they get the residents permit how do you do that by teaching them Flemish, Belgian culture by teaching them Dutch you see what I mean still with me in this story cool right one of the things that we realized is that some of the people there why many of the people in that informal classroom because it was not a regular classroom people could attend or could not attend people could come in and out and so forth and so forth so quite a few many people in the classroom were not highly educated in terms of level of education and the writing let's call it literacy skill was rather rather dodgy now the point is that and I don't have a time to present you with the full transcript of the lesson that are being following while Frieda was teaching them Dutch but fundamentally the lesson that was in front of them the motto the practical professional knowledge that Frieda tried to pass on to them was write it as you say it it will just be fine my friend now bridging graphemes with phonemes this was the main topic of Frieda's lesson this picture this picture reports a bird we started with birdie birds and bubbles we go back to birds and she was trying to teach to her students how to pronounce in Dutch the word of this you know, how to call it I've already heard it in the background you guys have of course knowledge anybody that um well no, okay in Dutch this is called must great so the word in Dutch is must but of course the people the students didn't know how to pronounce it so once you encounter for the first time a foreign word you try to map a grapheme, a phoneme onto a grapheme so you try to map how you speak something out without you writing and what do you do? you do it on the basis of the languages that you already know right? good lovely now in the moment in which the people there were French speaker they would go must, must in the moment in which there would have been anglophone they would say mouse tulik in the moment in which there would have been there would have been Russian phone well anyway Russian or as their language must so you see they were very valid I mean the transcript is great but I had to sum it all up very valid attempts on the basis of their sociolinguistic repertoires very valid attempts in order to map phonemes onto graphemes in order to make sense how you pronounce a certain word to conclude of course as you do in ethnographic studies anthropological studies you then carry out a long conversation in order to understand the informant in front of you but also you carry out a retrospective interview because you observed what this person was doing in class you think is very interesting and you go like hey tell me what do you think was going on really in class and we had a lovely long chat about language and their understanding of language based also on what she had been doing going to Africans of fourth here are two key sentences that I think that very much fit with the idea with the elephant in the classroom tonight she goes yes if you go to those countries referring to the countries where these people are coming from right it is all ends and feed right and here it is also a little bit like that and she carries on with the following look those people have several languages really beautiful languages but there are no languages really do you get what I mean and I guess I'll stop here thank you very much that gives us some time also to ask questions and we greatly gladly take them I'm looking in the room if someone wants to share their thoughts on their specific languages that they speak or have some insight about universals can I give someone the floor and I have this frightening microphone here so if I walk to you I can also just ask you the question but if I think about languages my name is van Beest and an example that comes to me I studied in the United States and there people would always pronounce me as Ilya van Best so they kind of like thought like winner something best that's not and then I also studied one year in Great Britain and there it was always Beast but I found it very interesting like how two well similar languages in my opinion would do something completely different like Ilya van Best in the United States but Ilya van Beast in Great Britain that would be a very interesting question of course to answer but I was wondering if I if I may a question like you also talked a little bit about universals and could you say a little bit more about that like what we mean by that is that across languages that we do the same thing in every language? No, what I meant was that there are universal models through which we human beings do judge and they get applied back into how they perceive languages so for instance when I refer to a universal model and the example that I gave was well the good how many cultures is up there and the baddies down there which has also to do with religion of course and has to also to do with ritualities of burial for instance happens in the ground and so forth these there are also universal ideological construct for instance one of the many is standard language and the value of standard language quite often we do value more standard language and the language of a learner who is trying with his own sociolinguistic repertoire to get to a certain point but is not reaching that point as yet so in my view there is a scheme of normativity being present in education which at times tends to close up the doors even before you actually get to the goal these kind of courses they are very useful they were teaching people to Dutch in order to have them to insert themselves in society and I use the word insert explicitly and not integrate but fundamentally the way in which it was done it was rather catechistic take a piece of me, take a piece of standard language and you will be like me that kind of thing oh yeah what would you advise her to do differently based on your analysis well we had that we had a moment of re-appreciation of what happened in the classroom because of course one of the things of ethnography is that you don't just collect your data hit and run and publish something out of it but you actually do ethnographic monitoring how can you improve things within your classrooms and all of a sudden she became aware of the fact that oh gosh when I was showing that slide about all the sociolinguistic backgrounds of the students of the kids present in class that was very illuminating for her of course though all the resources that she was using were the resources that she used with primary school children when she was working it was not education aimed for adults as L2 learners and you could see that everything was crumbling down but from an ethnographic point of view in the moment in which you have a teacher no matter what retired or not a teacher becoming aware of the sociolinguistic potential that students in front of her have as multilingual but that's ready again in my view okay thank you I'm looking a little bit at the room again and many many questions to keep on bubbling in my head because I find this fascinating and we also talk a little bit about the concept of voice yeah and maybe for those that voice because you refer to that in my discipline is just about speaking up so are you able to speak up and then I kind of like understood that maybe it's not so different after all right because is the capacity of being understood so the capacity to map for instance a language form onto a language function there is an example here well it's too long to show it but fundamentally if we take the concept of voice from which introduced it in order to defend the position of black afro-american children in urban schools then we we go back to this idea of standard you know they were always measured their language was always measured against the standard which they could never match because the home language was different than the standard language so in the moment in which you would have a classroom in which you can emancipate yourself by using your own vernacular next to the standard language then there is a matching of voices so you can be understood by your teacher by the other key figures that form your identity in education on the other hand in the moment in which you find a situation in which the standard of that the voice idea comes to crumble down very really well thank you let's give a big hand and I would like to call Marc Canelo okay thanks so much for being here it's the same exciting feeling that I have a live audience I have been teaching online all day and now I have people who breathe and make noise and my goodness I don't have any slides Elephant in the classroom congratulations with the subject let's have a look at the elephant four males on the podium 45% of the PhDs are female something like 16% is professor that might be an elephant in the classroom if you look at for instance I'm a sociologist so I look from a more sociological perspective we had a huge emancipation of girls going into higher education which was very successful we now have a little bit more than 50% of the students in higher education are females but if you look at the sectors where they are studying if you would go to the Technical University of Eindhoven you will still see a very male dominated system and there is no way that people in Eindhoven at the station are saying males go to Technical University girls go to Tilburg what's happening over there if you are gay and you want to play soccer as a man you have a hard time and probably the whole stadium maybe the Willem Tray Stadium as well is shouting gays to players who play not too well or whatever and if you look at the position of migrants in our labour market even highly qualified migrants still have a hard time finding jobs I had a student he graduated cum laude from Erasmus University in econometrics he went to Inziat he became first of class in Inziat but he had a Moroccan back name and when he wrote his application forms to the Dutch Netherlands Bank he was not even invited he wrote application forms for other students Dutch students and they were all invited and by the way someone who graduates cum laude from econometrics and who is best in class in Inziat that's really top of the bill all we are talking about but he is Moroccan and he is working in Africa now where he is very happy by that so that's basically the elephant in the room we are talking about and the funny thing is that we don't live in a society I'm a professor in South Africa as well we live in a society under apartheid actually the first amendment of our constitution says no discrimination so what's happening over here and that's basically the question I ask myself and thank you for the opportunity to ask to ask myself this question and the first thing I want to do is go back to a research project very long time ago in the early 60s of the former century which has become very famous in the educational science and it's named the Pygmalion effect Pygmalion in the classroom basically it would be a research we never could do again basically what happened is that you have a class of kids and just before the summer holidays just before the moment they changed class they were labeled completely random saying ok he is lazy she is stupid she is very active she is really motivated and those labels were transferred to the new teachers so you get Jos in the room as a new teacher take care he is lazy he hasn't been working so far and a very very sad thing to conclude was that after 3 months the behavior of the students was up to the labels so one of the big lessons we learn from that type of education and again we couldn't do that type of research nowadays one of the big lessons is that expectations are very important in education if you set high expectations for students then they will perform on a higher level than when you set low expectations and you may recall it from your own classes if you have this old a couple of you just come from secondary education and obviously we are very motivated and sharp teachers over there who have high expectations and then you do your job and then you do your homework and there is this old nasty guy like me saying well I don't think you did your homework and basically you are lazy and no cheating during tests and a little bit on the cynical side and then basically what happens is that you lose your motivation so expectations and that's basically what we started seeing after the Pygmalion research expectations are very important in terms of education and in terms of steering educational behavior of pupils then the question is how do those expectations form where do the exact actually come from I like to work very much with a theory which is from political science and it's about street level bureaucrats it's also Mike Lipsky American political scientist and he looks at a very specific type of professionals teachers for instance but also policemen and specific jobs in healthcare and those are the people who are working in a situation where you don't really have time to think you need to react spot on a policeman in the street he can't stay in the car and look in the laws what to do he or she has to go out of the car and has to act I was a teacher in Matschappijlich social science in a school for vocational education and obviously when I started working it was quite a difference keeping order in the class and things like that and when the kids were screwing up I couldn't say hey come on guys time out I go to my teachers from my teacher college and ask them what to do I had to act I had to act spot on so this specific idea of acting spot on means that those guys teaching and policing or whatever guys and girls they have what we call a theory in use they use a very practical short hand of ideas and those theories in use they steer the expectation, the level of expectation basically one of the graduate students of Mike Lipsky Lipsky already is an old one he's called Bernardo Tzaka he's at MIT and he did a wonderful observational study in a social service in New York basically and what he was doing he was looking at the front desk of the social security office and basically what he saw was that the professionals at the front desk and they were blatant racists they were very nice people they were working in social trying to help people they framed people coming in three types she has an attitude she has a condition and he has a situation having a situation for instance people missing an appointment if someone has a situation then you can understand that he or she doesn't show up and you are very nice and maybe I'm going to bring the money to you that's the situation the condition is that she has a strong health not a very strong health so maybe she's not feeling too well so I'll accept that she's not on my appointment but the attitude is it's yours again it's always yours lazy bastard that doesn't get out of his bed even if he has to collect his money I'll pick him out and basically this type of framing theory in use I have three categories in my head I need to react very quickly I don't have the time to really check and recheck what I'm doing that's the world of the street level bureaucrat and that's the world of teachers basically those frames set expectations and then we know that expected people students act up to the expectations so probably yours is going to be nasty after a while yeah so that's my second thought so we have this Pygmalion idea of the role of expectations and the second idea is where do those expectations come from and they have a very specific way or specific way of developing in those street level type of professions where you don't have the time to add back and reflect on what you're actually doing or consult with colleagues or whatever that's typically with policemen, with teachers with doctors to a certain extent okay then another thought basically I don't think that at this university we do have a lot of narcissist, boquito, male, chauvinist picks I couldn't see them or know them or know where they are but still there's quite a lot of inequality in this university so maybe it's not so much in the individual behavior but it's in the programs and the processes and the structures of the university and for instance if you look at the procedure to appoint a professor I've never been in procedures like this quite often and I've never witnessed people saying please no females but I've been often in positions where they say let's look at the list of publications and that's a structural thing I've often been in a situation where we say okay if you want to be a professor or an excellent researcher or whatever it's like top sport you have to work during weekends you have to work during evenings etc etc and by coincidence some males have a better opportunity to do so than some females so it's not blatant behavior it's roles, it's norms it's maybe also I like the word that you put on it Max it's maybe the schemes of normativity what actually do we like what actually do we recognize behavior that fits into our zone of comfort and how much would it cost if we go out of this zone of comfort and actually do I have the time to go out of my zone of comfort because I'm a street level bureaucrat and I don't have time to experiment with new ideas so that's more on the institutional side of education of no idea of the time Julia, doing fine? okay I have like maybe three or four minutes another thing if you look at what we are doing in education if you look at our teaching then it's very important to distinguish this is a little bit from educational science between the curriculum on paper and the curriculum as taught and more important what we call the hidden curriculum and the hidden curriculum not on paper, it's not in a textbook you're not tested on it but it's the behavior I show it's the people who I pay attention to it's the language I use it's for me it's kind of a difficult step at this very moment to realize that just talking into ladies and gentlemen may not be the right terms to use anymore we need to find different lingo and that's hidden curriculum so this idea of the hidden curriculum and what we know from educational science is that the hidden curriculum may be even more important than the curriculum on paper the role modeling what you see as a behavior what you see as positive behavior what you see as normative schemes demonstrated by teachers or by police officers or whatever and that might be in education specifically in education if you look at discrimination or racism you have to dig deeper in what's happening in this hidden curriculum and now my final point and that's the nasty one and I lean on the work of a famous sociologist called Darendorf a German sociologist and basically what Darendorf's pointed at is the following in our society come on guys, we are a modern Western European open minded inclusive society we don't have any discrimination over here we have all kind of financial schemes for students from poor families or from areas where we have all kind of support systems etc etc if you don't succeed in a system which is so fair as ours it must be your own bloody fault the system was fair we do have study financing we do have coaches, we do have this, we do have that and then that's what Darendorf says I think he's spot on in his idea that if you are confronted with discrimination, sexism or whatever within a world which from itself has the idea that it's explicitly not sexist or apartheid or whatever then you get a kind of confusion on actually why am I different, why am I not successful why am I not a professor why am I not working in the labour market job the whole society says it's a fair society and that's basically where we come in and maybe we are back in social psychology again as a sociologist I'm always a little bit what's happening over there it probably will go into self-esteem we are looking for instance now at a sociologist at the role of self-esteem discrimination after what happened in the labour market what happened to my Moroccan student what happened to his self-esteem what happened to him when he said maybe I should consider using a Dutch name what does it do with your self-esteem if that's what you're looking at so the nasty part in our society and that's exactly where the elephant comes in the room if we have the idea that we do not discriminate it's still in the room it's not out of the room but as soon as we start saying that it's not in the room we make it very difficult for those people where it is in the room where it is a reality of neglecting their sexual identity or orientation neglecting their migrant status neglecting the languages Miss Frida she definitely was a very nice lady but it probably did something to the self-esteem of her students actually I would be fascinated to see what her hidden curriculum what would be the effect of her hidden curriculum doing to the group of newcomers in that society so that's I think a very important thing just to conclude as a final thought I think it's very good and that's the reason that I was very happy to speak at your symposium be it in a group of males things happen I think it's a very good idea that you address this point of racism and discrimination within the boundaries of this university so thanks for that racism and discrimination may have gone underground because we have the First Amendment in our constitution because we don't have an apartheid system over here so we have the idea that it's not around anymore in the official systems but it is and because it is underground we need to think about new forms new ideas, new language maybe to start talking about something that's underground the elephant in the room as soon as it starts moving it may get nasty and we may shy away from this idea of the elephant but we have to try to get the elephant out of the room and one of the things is starting discussions like this thanks so much this is how an educational sociologist looks at your work and thanks again for the invitation thank you Marc a lot of food for thought here and again I'm looking into the room whether there is someone that wanted to kind of like give some feedback here or has a question or comment and I also have questions but first I was very touched by your story of your talk and one of the questions when will the people that feel discriminated step up because I'm a female professor to find out around the age of 45 that I wanted to step up and voice and for the first time I started to say indeed I feel discriminated but it took so long before you see it yourself so it was just interesting because you touched me with your story do you see a pattern or do you see resources people need to step up and say I feel here discriminated and what is the right moment in your career you should do so I learned that you should not do it too early probably you can't do it every day again so you need to choose your battles it's not a very easy question maybe just two thoughts maybe on it if I look at the situation in South Africa with apartheid and if I talk to my colleagues over there they say it was easier talking about discrimination when apartheid was a system than it's now because everyone says we don't have apartheid anymore we had Mandela so what happened to apartheid and if you look at the situation at the moment it is even worse than in the times of apartheid so I think so it's maybe not the moment but it's this idea of this kind of self congratulating system that we say we don't have it in the room I think that's the first thing we need to address maybe the woke discussion is pushing the alarm bell I'm confused by it but I can understand that people push the alarm bell like this what we need to do with it and how we need to deal with it and whether we need to make an official language of the city of Amsterdam about how to speak about minorities or about gender I'm still confused but at the end of the day I'm glad that someone pushed the alarm bell because we were like sliding away in a kind of discourse and a political discourse that discrimination was something that doesn't fit in the Dutch society and that because we have it in the First Amendment that it's over and dealt with but then the other thing is that it's very hard so it's not the type of thing that you can deal with following the lines of formal politics of the political discourse it needs to be somewhere else somewhere else young people trying to catch up with people trying to maybe work with people who are in a position which is not too easy to step aside saying hey okay it's okay you can have my position it's basically what Ilya also said the idea of stealing jobs the idea of that your own status can enhance by pushing another one downward that's not an answer I realize but that's what sociologists typically do but I do have a question maybe that's also for the group maybe we can have it but first I see a hand there so I'm going to go to you I have new glasses so that's why I'm doing like this I need to adjust to these new glasses Sophie, also to your question I was wondering if the people who do feel discriminated is it actually their role to step up or is it the role of the people who are not discriminated against to actually create space to see the discrimination and to create space for everyone to feel safe and it's not the role of people who are not discriminated against to educate ourselves I mean we're in a university so you shouldn't we start educating ourselves about discrimination about racism and then create that safe space so that like we systematically start to erase that and I was wondering if you have like any idea how to create that space because like we are in the university but I feel like it's not really happening yet and like how do we start with it I tend to think I tend to hope that specifically universities should be the provider of safe places they should be the place where you can discuss about everything in a free way and as soon as we go into an alley where the curriculum doesn't allow teachers don't allow then in all education we have a problem but in university if we do this in university then we don't have a problem but we are in deep shit so it's that I think the freedom of the academia includes the freedom of being yourself and working with yourself as a team and building up etc etc maybe we need to rethink maybe it's an old idea but maybe we need to rethink better coaching, better employability better programs for this whole idea of that it creeps into yourself this self-esteem what's happening and what we learn now from the labour market that's a very nasty thing to deal with so we need to basically build maybe not structures but better atmospheres if I think about structures as a question maybe for the group also for you or also myself one of the ways that you could tackle discrimination is first to realise are there really innate differences between people of a specific colour of gender and I think that most people would agree no, there is no reason to assume that if you are a colour X or Y you are smarter you are faster or whatever there are no innate differences then if you see that in a society there are differences that by definition means some form of discrimination is happening and I think one of the solutions that some people then advocate which I think is an interesting one is to come with quota that you just basically say look if there are no reasons to assume that there are differences in intelligence between men and women and assume that professors are selected on their intelligence probably not but let's assume that then how is it possible that there are no equal number of female and male professors there must be something structural going on and maybe what you then need to do is explicitly just say we will only hire this number of people and force that it will be an equal number based on whatever proportion there is but I'm kind of like wondering I'm asking this question maybe to you but also to all of us what about quota as a solution Eindhoven University is working with it now so it's interesting to see what's happening over there basically I think quota can work but there is a big risk quota that you see it as a technical problem and that you just have to meet the quota and then say ok we met the quota so we are over the hook so that will be one but so I'm not saying you shouldn't do it but it's like a complicated thing the second one is that we know this idea of tokenism hey we have this female in the board of the university what are you nagging about so there are quite strong mechanisms within the existing system to in a way encapsulate this idea of ok we are going to deal with discrimination or sexism or whatever and those mechanisms are very easily flipped around and to work as a defensive mechanism again so that's basically where I'm still looking for because I don't know what would be the thing to do actually I don't think we need to go for a one-trick pony say quota will do the job if you go into the field of quota you will need to look at the surrounding environment you will need to look at the anthropological way of looking, perceiving quota etc because it's not a technical thing to solve it's much deeper than that any other thoughts in the room on that like maybe another spin which I as a teacher maybe sometimes I'm thinking about I am more and more in a classroom that is very international and once there was a theory that if you have stereotypes about people what you should do, you should all put them together in the same room because they will then learn from each other and schools are very different places to do so so they started schools in the United States and they had people of different backgrounds within the same school and to their amazement what actually happened is that stereotypes increased and why was that well apparently one of the things that goes wrong sometimes that if you are in a school to some received as a system of competition that you want to be the best student in your school setting and if there are then people of different backgrounds in that same setting and they're all for attention of the teacher to be the best then actually, like I said this self esteem argument there are many reasons why people then will put the other one down so one thing that we have to do from that and I'm not sure whether we have mastered that already to put that into our curriculum but at some of them we have the dean present here so I also speak to her here but one of the things that we could do in schools more is to ensure that the tasks that we give to students are joint tasks where you need the other student to accomplish that also means that we as students should appreciate that the grading is not an individual grade anymore it becomes a group grade so suddenly it's not maybe that you as an individual are cum laude but it is your group that has a cum laude grade and I'm not sure whether we are already ready for that but that would be something that at least from social psychological theory should work if you give a joint assignment to the perspectives are needed to solve the problem that is known to decrease prejudices and known to decrease discrimination but it maybe comes at the cost that you as an individual shine less and with that thought maybe just came into my mind and it's something very concrete we can do in university look at the literature you use we use I was trained to be a history teacher and so I've never really worked as history teacher but history always has been a very dear hobby of me and specifically the history of the first world war a couple of years ago I got a a book on the first history on the first world written by a Pakistani historian who looked at what happened in Europe from a Pakistani Arabic perspective and it hit me like a bullet shit I'm 55 I've been studying this subject for more than 30 years 40 years and there was a completely different perspective on history so why didn't we teach this in our classes look at the literature we use in racism look at the literature we use on the emancipation of gays in education it's outside of the curriculum it's not in the literature it's not in history books a last question because there's also some moment for a little bit of a break but I will go to you also to what you just said what about decolonizing the curriculum I know that is like a very long way to go but like what you just said of diversifying the readings because what we mainly learn are very wide educated rich texts of white old man from 80's whatever so it's like a very outdated view on things so we could update the readings and topics like you just said actually racism LGBTQAI plus it's not really talked about or included in the material so do you think it would make sense or is it possible to change it and how would you change it or should that be like a different course and all the studies or just like one lecture each did you ever talk about with professors or is there any idea I mean it won't be very easy and again we don't it's not a one trick pony that will work over here but just to start with your awareness guys this is the assignment this is the article please have a look at the literature they use is there something in your mind which kind of hey it's all American just another example that is basically from your world if you go into databases for medical research a lot of the data is based on white males so if you go into if you need to have some form of a test or whatever you probably will be tested against a database of white males do we teach students to be careful with those kind of biases or do we say no this is the database and because it's data it's holy we don't touch it working in Africa and by the way, Stellenbosch is not the most diverse university in South Africa but still there is a group of people I work with there's quite good African literature organization science I never see it in our hardly ever not never hardly ever see it in our readings maybe by starting the awareness specifically with students asking questions why is this what we have to read why isn't there something different that we can read maybe is there something from a female perspective we can read on this issue no but I think it's part of the academic development that we need to at least we need to teach our students to be critical on this kind of biases in group discussions we tend to like to talk about those things that are common so that we share because we like to belong to a group and one of the techniques that groups can use to get out of that is assign a devil's advocate in a group and you should be very explicit that this is a assigned role because if you don't assign the role and someone just takes that role by him or herself he will be kicked out of the group in no time because they will dislike him so you should be very clever in doing that so if you want to change the curriculum or update the way we have a conversation and to get out of the box as a group you should formally decide that someone takes the role as a devil's advocate and from that role has the duty, the obligation to come up with the counter argument from a different perspective and that everybody knows that they do that for the benefit of the group the moment they would not know that then it would be quickly for social beings we like to be with each other and this dissonant sound you kind of like will ignore and it will be kind of like expelled out of the group you need to be careful there there is a raised hand and I also don't want to stand between you and a toilet or a moment the final one because we were always in the train together thank you great thank you for what I want to repeat here because for those that maybe are online now basically we have an institution in place in our university and the call is there to use them they have an educational board you can be participating in that and you can give them the information that you think they should have because don't expect that they come up with themselves necessarily I think that's the summary of what I just heard let's all go back to our seats I would like to thank you for a wonderful discussion that we had prior to our little break but I also want to notice that we are going to continue with our next speaker and that after our next speaker we will also of course have some more questions and answers and hopefully we will even learn more so give a big hand to Mark thank you okay final speaker for this evening on policy practice education prejudice of course good evening all I'm going to start off by introducing you to a bit of history in a research project in Kerekrade, Limburg the deep south of the Netherlands in the 1970s the question was if there was any difference between teachers evaluations of the assignments of speakers of Dutch as home language and speakers of dialect in their school classes and it turned out that teachers rated writing tasks of dialect speakers in their classroom lower than tasks of speakers of Dutch well, you might think perhaps dialect speakers have more difficulties writing Dutch than pupils who speak Dutch as their home language but when the tasks were anonymized so the teacher did not know wrote the assignment and also other teachers rated these anonymized assignments the ratings were very different now the ratings of the writing tasks of the dialect speakers were on average not lower than the others apparently negative attitudes of teachers towards dialect speakers in their classroom influenced the assessment of their language proficiency so this prejudice even culminated in significantly lower grades for dialect speakers in general in this primary school in Kerkrade this tells us that in those days following the norms of educated literacy was the right thing to do and this still is very influential so educated literacy applies using standard language in class and educational institutions therefore typically opted and still opt for a Dutch only monolingual habitus quite often moreover standard language and specifically speaking without an accent was the ultimate goal of foreign or second language teaching according to the common European framework of reference for languages CEFR the influential tool of the Council of Europe published in 2001 to promote the learning and teaching of foreign languages this framework describes different characteristics of six levels of foreign language proficiency ranging from the lowest level A1 you have heard of this the basic user to the highest level of the proficient user C2 and from the fourth level pronunciation as it says here pronunciation of the foreign or second language is described as has acquired a clear natural pronunciation and intonation however in 2018 the CEFR from 2001 has been refreshed has been adapted to user experiences and new developments one of the scales that changed most dramatically is the scale related to pronunciation to accent no longer the control of an idealized native speaker is the ultimate goal of language acquisition because idealized models that ignore the retention of accent lack consideration for context and social linguistic aspects and learner's needs now this is in line with other social developments with regard to attitudes to language and linguistic diversity and often linguistic diversity is related of course to cultural diversity and that social development points to the public tolerance towards diversity and language and language and language and speech this seems to have increased over the last 30 years when you look at for instance Dutch television broadcasting we now hear much more accented speech than in the 1970s with its program announcers of the speakers of proper Dutch so maybe this is a process of democratization of the standard language it seems to cause this increase of tolerance to accents and in addition the sympathetic attention to regional culture may have increased this tolerance towards diversity referred to as the rise of the regional so people become more concerned with regional culture maybe because of globalization and have more pride for their own region and accents of course are a central part of such regional culture now secondly present day multilingualism increases tolerance towards diversity since practically everyone in our societies speaks more than one language of course and many of those languages are spoken with a certain accent think of the many forms of English in the UK and the US in India or South Africa in China or Russia there is English in many different accents again now in the Netherlands never before there have been so many people for whom Dutch was not the mother tongue and nor was our economy so immensely international in general our language use and Dutch as a language have become more diverse have become very diverse and accents are everywhere and therefore Jop van der Horst wrote 13 years ago there is no longer generally accepted standards pronunciation in radio and television broadcasting in the classroom of a secondary school has become immensely diverse furthermore the Dutch language union promotes a polycentric view to standard Dutch meaning that we have more than one center Dutch in the Netherlands in Belgium in Suriname and these three are different and they may be different as well as a diversity perspective the Dutch language union also has a diversity perspective Dutch comes in many flavors and that's okay variation is tolerated okay so this all being the introduction does this mean that what happened in Kerkrad now is far behind us prejudice about dialect or accent is no longer present in education or on the labor markets no we still read or hear in the media about young people who encounter prejudice because of their accent and that's the focus of this paper as you already noticed often these stories refer to experiences regarding the job market or job interviews for instance when young people from peripheral areas in the Netherlands confess they do not dare to apply for jobs in Randstad the center and dominant area in the west because they speak with a regional accent so this comes from Metro news my accent hinders me and everyone makes comments on it after I graduated I consciously applied for a job in Brabant here everyone is used to my accent and elsewhere you notice how big the differences are so I wish I could turn off my accent this is a story in a newspaper by a 25 year old psychologist from Sertogenbos in Brabant and furthermore it's striking that the same psychologist found herself unprofessional because of the accent so she also said during my studies I liked to present one project I did together with a fellow student who did not have a marked accent and we looked over the presentation a couple of times and then I decided he should present I thought myself unprofessional and these are the statements made by a 29 year old woman from us also in Brabant showing a negative attitude towards her own accent her accent will not help when looking for a job it offers little perspective for the future my pronunciation makes me insecure she says I think the accent is bulky and boorish so the accent comes with associations stereotypical associations and that's another example here a 19 year old actor from a younger area in the periphery from the NPO documentary which is really interesting called Dielen metje dialect it's pure discrimination we are considered dump farmers, bear drinkers men in clocks and more of such things so these examples really show how young people from peripheral areas in the Netherlands are worried about being confronted with their regional accents and consequently feel stigmatized as inferior persons they take it very personal now furthermore speaking with a foreign accent is also reported to have a negative influence on evaluations and assessments regardless of the speaker's actual proficiency in the language involved so minorities who speak the dominant language with an accent experience discriminative behavior and they feel they are categorized as incapable and intelligible and intelligent and therefore less competent and less valuable and this is strikingly visible on the job market when foreign language speakers in general underachieve this is another example Moroccan Dutchmen are aggressive, ugly unreliable and dumb compared to speakers of other accents those are the deeply rooted judgments of people when just hearing Moroccan Dutchmen speak but not seeing them I'll explain and sometimes these images even border on latent racism I would say this is latent racism or racism plainly this comes from a documentary Bekennis van Nu Knowledge From Now broadcast also by NPO in 2016 and the documentary maker has this reflection here on a part where a Dutch person and a Moroccan Dutch person look with the same people on the telephone so they were not seen but they were heard and the accent was noticed and this is the reflection that fits that little experiment so we actually observe an accent ceiling an accent ceiling called or coined rather by Jurgen Jaspers an accent ceiling similar to last ceiling of course the vertical segregation based on gender in our society this segregation is based on accent is the cause of unequal treatment of various minorities in our society so what happens here is that that accent becomes indexical of a social category associated with a certain group of people and that accent is a very remarkable feature of that group of people and such features then are associated with stereotypical properties of that perceived category I hear a Achterhoek accent and I think of men in clogs and I think of beer drinkers I think of boorish people bulky people this accent tells a lot about those people and all these things that you mention you actually don't know you don't know if that guy that actor 19 years old from the Achterhoek wears clogs or drinks beer maybe he doesn't even like beer you don't know that so language here is one of the most prominent factors that we use to categorize people accent really is very important when we look at this social issue societal issue and it's very often of course connected to ethnicity nationality or regional identities as in the case of the Achterhoek okay so the tolerance towards linguistic diversity has increased I just said but still but still it is like well yeah all accents are equal but some accents are more equal than others we prefer certain accents above other accents now in order to dig deeper into this interesting issue we did a case study at the teacher training college in Dutch in the city and here we specifically addressed the question if future teachers of Dutch their teachers in training so the future teachers of Dutch may or may not speak with an accent in the classroom and I did this case study together with Petra Pulmans and Arma Kerkhoff first we we read essays on accents we read a couple of essays on accents a couple almost 100 written by first year students as part of their writing task in a language proficiency test so first year students do a language proficiency test and they were asked to reflect on this issue can a future teacher speak with an accent in the classroom in these essays and we noticed that students at the teacher training college often do not mind their own accents most of my students speak with the Moroccan accent themselves why should I adjust my accent or why should I change my accent my bandage accent in this case I will work in Tilburg anyway so referring to probably the people I'm going to work with will have the same accent as I have so the students are very much aware that in practice practically everybody has some kind of accent some sort of accent a little accent somewhere and they assess accents quite positively they're not very purist when it comes to standard language now next to these qualitative data from essays we worked with the questionnaire with 136 respondents and I will focus on those data now and the respondents were first great students again of various school subjects at the same teacher training college of course in Tilburg biology, geography, social studies Dutch and English and here is a little overview of the questions we asked the respondents some of the questions to give their opinion on Dutch speech with the following accents and you can read along Brabantisch, Limburgian, Amsterdam, Flemish Dutch Antilles Curacao Aruba French, Turkish, Moroccan and Polish accents of Dutch and our aim was of course to find out how attitudes towards various indigenous accents and foreign accents can we call that indigenous accents, yeah I think so and we used Likert scales for these assessments so these are the mean scores in the Likert scales 1 to 5 and we asked how beautiful or ugly do you think this accent sounds how good or bad a teacher with the different accent is how much of an authority a teacher is speaking different accents or how approachable they are and how sympathetic there were more questions of course but I picked these ones out so in this way we tap into the aesthetics of accents and speakers traits professionalism scholarship likability intelligence now what we see now is that these results they show that first grade students at the teacher training college generally are quite positive about accents in general they are quite positive and the differences in appreciation of distinct accents are not too big small differences but still they consider the accent from their immediate surroundings brabantish least problematic our research side Tilburg in the center of Brabant of course the mean score in our Likert scales is 3 of course and all scores for brabantish are below 3 now the respondents consider a teacher with the brabantish accent as more sympathetic accessible than teachers with other accents and furthermore they find at least ugly a teacher with a brabantish accent is better than the other accents and also has more authority so this is very much in line with findings of colleagues in Utrecht listeners from the south turn out to be listeners from the south of the Netherlands Brabant and Limburg turn out to find speech of their own region more beautiful more standard than listeners from other regions in the Netherlands so when you're from the south yourself you think you're not very deviant when you speak with your own accent now students are also quite tolerant to a teacher with a Flemish, French or Dutch Antillion accent little less to other Dutch accents Amsterdam, Limburg but our respondents gave the most negative evaluation to a speaker with a Turkish Moroccan or Polish accent those three stand out especially when it comes to ugliness of the accent and in table one the Turkish, Polish and Moroccan accents score more than the mean three in all types of attitudes so for Polish even all mean scores are above three and the beautiful ugly even above four it's the only score above four so apparently the difference lies here in the sorts of accents and you already guessed this accents familiar to the classroom are helpful accents that are less familiar are maybe harmful but most remarkable is that especially the accents associated with labour migration groups labour immigration are rejected that's Turkish, Moroccan and Polish so apparently our future teachers they tolerate speaking with an accent but it depends a little bit on which accent we're talking about right so I'm going to the end of my little talk final slide so apparently a foreign but western European accent, French was in there or an overseas but Dutch accent was in there are considered better than a foreign accent associated with labour immigration and the word foreign here is perhaps not just literally from abroad but it has broader unitation foreign actually refers to the other not us, not ourselves but the others foreign is very different is distinct is perhaps also not belonging so foreign has a far broader denotation I think that's my interpretation here but maybe we can discuss this then the literal meaning from abroad because also a French accent would be considered from abroad right and it seems that those accents associated with labour immigration are considered more foreign than for instance French so there is a limit I think a limitation to that tolerance of speaking with an accent and this points to different types of attitudes towards accents so language variation speaking with accents speaking in certain wordings can be more prestigious of course and can be more plebeian and apparently labour migration and plebeian prestige are connected to each other whereas speaking with a French accent maybe still is connected to that other type of prestige it's more prestigious and the question of course a very important question I think is how these teachers in training will think about various accents when they finish college and start working in secondary education or perhaps even more important are they, are we aware of prejudice and accents do we really know how we feel about them so I end with a question for you thank you for organizing this superb program I really enjoyed the other speakers and also the discussion and thank you very much for listening we have about 7 minutes for a fruitful discussion and then some people may leave the Dutch soccer team playing to the Turkish soccer team but we can also continue but those that want to leave in 7 minutes please do so but first let me open the discussion here a little bit are there some comments or suggestions that we have on this talk and I see someone over there and I'll go then yeah so I had a question about today because the lecture was of course stereotypes and why they were bad and why we had to combat them of course also other things but I had a question I think to truly make sure that stereotypes are stopped and that we judge every individual by themselves we have to know how they come about so that as soon as we know that then we can go against it but then how do stereotypes especially negative ones come into existence okay we have a question about where do stereotypes come from yeah good question I think we grow up with stereotypes we simply learn them as children we learn them from our parents from the people around us from television from whatever you play for games nowadays because there are they are all around us when you think about the cartoons that you saw in your younger years then often the bad guys speak with a certain accent bad guys often have a German accent for instance especially if the cartoon is for a Dutch audience because we like to think German people are bad people this is something that's rooted very deeply and practically everyone I think practically everyone knows that not all German people are bad people of course we know this and still we think in stereotypes and often they work very well so that's another thing why it's very difficult to get rid of them people in marketing and making commercials love stereotypes they work perfectly and we associate and we love the stereotypes and that process of association is very important in marketing and making commercials and advertising so it's not very easy to do what you what you ask how could we do this but it is a perfect question because we really need to deal with them and the first thing that we have to do is describe them tell them that they are there and addressing them and talking to each other about them and the negative influences that they can have and they're not just negative they also can be fun I think many of you if you're from the Netherlands know about certain little rivalries between Brabantisch people and Limburgian people or between the Hague and Rotterdam and Amsterdam all these little rivalries are also very fun so they're not always bad but they need to be addressed and they need to be out in the open and maybe if I add something to that as well I think it was kind of like hidden in our discussions where co-active misers is the word so it's difficult for an individual to assess the world in all its beauty differences so we have these shortcuts, mental shortcuts to organize how we think and it just makes life easy and a stereotype is nothing more than a schema that makes life easy so if I know that all men are like that it's easy it helps us to navigate the world without thinking all the time it also means under pressure and that you cannot think stereotypes will have more of an influence on your decision making than if you have more time to think so the example of marketing and commercials it is for a reason why they have maybe loud sounds and all that stuff because then it makes it maybe a little bit more difficult for you to really think about the fact that there is now a real explaining that women should do the dishes somehow like that for some particular reason the male voice is the authority but the example we are doing the dishes is a female and they link that together and if you really start to think about that that's odd on many many levels the other thing I think was also shared today is the labeling the moment if I'm always moved in a particular category then maybe I also start to lift the part if you will so in social psychology we would say life is a stage and we perform a part because it also helps other people to understand what I'm going to do next so in my role as a professor I stand before you and I play also the part that I think I should play being a professor but if I'm going home and I continue to play the role as professor at home it goes wrong fast there I need to play the role of father or husband so apparently we also use stereotypes or schema to to work our own life in ways so I think maybe it's a little bit difficult to say that stereotypes are not necessarily bad but there are aspects of them that make them bad especially if you are in situations where you are a minority relative to a majority because they are power imbalances and then those stereotypes are often not to your advantage question does the medium that you use plays a role a social media different in terms of stereotyping and other kind of media in social media as opposed to with text working with smileys rather than with text okay alright okay so here we had a situation where you are expected to show that you have certain proficiencies in the classroom or being an actor or going to a job interview and then you want to look your best you wear a nice suit and you do not speak with an accent and if you have an accent it may bother you but in the in-group communication situations on social media and I'm chatting with my friends about a football game this evening then the accent will become very handy because it will make my group more tight it is a solidarity thing I'm going to wear an orange shirt because I'm a fan of the orange football squad and I'm also talking to my other friends from the same city and we share our language we share our accents and certain words that others do not use definitely that context of education is very important here and that context of the job market because there you have to look your best and to sound your best and you will be evaluated if you sound differently great I also know that we have some audience out there that are not present physically but are present via online systems and we have here some people that are checking the chat and I was asking whether there are some comments that you would like to share from them yes so we have a question from one of our online viewers so did the people with the Turkish, Moroccan or Polish accent really speak clearly very good question excellent question actually the teachers in training the first year's students did not hear spoken Dutch with various accents they were just asked what do you think what your assessment would be if a teacher spoke Dutch in the classroom with a very clear Turkish accent so intelligibility was not part of the task but in the essays we noticed that this is that's why it's a very good question that this is exactly what people write down they write down yes an accent okay it may be there in the classroom when a teacher speaks Dutch with an accent as long as it is intelligibility and now it comes because especially the speakers of Turkish Dutch or Moroccan Dutch are very intelligible hey intelligibility and a certain type of accent are two completely different things someone with a Limburgian accent can also be difficult to understand depends on the gradation of your accent does he just speak with a soft G or is his accent very deep close to the dialect so intelligibility is another thing to rate but then still people automatically associate Turkish and Moroccan accents with oh yes that's unintelligible so that's another stereotypical prejudice situation but in our task we did not use sound samples maybe one last comment that I want to share with you about the people that I see in front of me and I will teach first year students in three weeks from now and one of the things that I always find amazing is that when I see the students in front of me they all look different because they started the year and they came from their own particular city or town where they have accustomed a particular way of dress so I find amazing that if the year graduates then suddenly the students start to look more similar and similar and similar so the unique difference what makes people stand out within the group changes over time because apparently we really like to be with each other and for that I think a lesson learned is also that if I think about the spirit of I do truly believe that just by being together maybe we lose the way we look but we gain more and more understanding of each other and with that it is time and I really want to thank you all for being here and give a big hand to all the speakers