Future teachers confronting extremism and hate speech

Abstract

Hate speech has become a social problem that needs to be addressed urgently. In many cases, these discourses and ideologies arrive through the media and the internet, and they are transferred to educational contexts. Debates of this type should be addressed at school and should be channelled into a democratic debate, and into the definition of shared objectives through the development of counterspeeches and alternative narratives based on Human Rights. In this research, we investigate the capacity of future teachers (n = 114) to identify online hate speech and how they develop counterspeeches. The results show that the majority are able to identify hate speech. However, future teachers present more difficulties developing counterspeeches or complex alternative narratives, which can be transferred to educational practices. We conclude that teacher training needs to be redesigned if we want them to be able to face these problems in their future educational practice.