Raising awareness about social exclusion in schools through experiential learning

Social exclusion has a myriad of negative effects on students’ psychological and social well-being. One way to combat such negative effects is to raise awareness about social exclusion in schools. Here, we describe and evaluate a training program that was carried out across schools in The Netherlands. The program relies on basic experiential learning principles and a well-established social exclusion paradigm to make participants experience and discuss social exclusion. We had two goals in the current paper: (1) discussing previous work supporting the feasibility of such programs and (2) presenting a secondary analysis of the data generated by the program. The analyses are based on 14,065 participants (ages 12–19) and a subset of those who evaluated the program later (n = 386). Our review of the literature supports the feasibility of the program. The results of the secondary data analyses indicate that participants found the program insightful, talked to others about the program, and applied the knowledge gained from the program to their own lives. Taken together, this provides a proof of concept for the evaluated training program.