Spanishkid is a website that tries to promote anti-racism and intercultural dialogue. It is mainly intended as an educational tool to help young people and teachers to know more about ethnic and cultural diversity. In our experience, we know that it is not easy to deal in class with the issues raised on the website, and authoritative accessible resources are hard to find. We, therefore, modestly, hope this website will be useful to you and could, at least partly, fill this gap.

The website is based around the life of nine virtual characters ('minorities' and 'majorities') from a variety of individual and group backgrounds. They are adolescents and all live in an imaginary Spanish city called 'Hispania'. Users are invited to 'meet' or 'hang out' with these characters. The characters show us their homes, introduce us to some members of their families, and tell us something about themselves and their lives (including their language/s, religion or belief, food, hassles and gang). However, the bulk of the website consists of dialogues between these adolescents (at times rather 'intellectual', at times 'passionate', at times 'peaceful', at times 'utopian'... and usually idealistic). These dialogues derive from living in an increasingly multicultural and interdependent society. The adolescents 'talk' about different facts (negative and positive), which, directly or indirectly, affect and/or worry them. The dialogues deal with relationships, families, education, future, dreams, hassles, words and 'jokes', stereotypes and myths, or exaggerated and fallacious ideas ("... they are too many and take 'our' jobs away, they're dirty and smell, they're thieves, they want to impose 'us' their beliefs and traditions, they don't want to integrate in 'our' society...").

There are two ways of exploring the website:

The first is by 'hanging out' with a character, to know his/her family, hassles, friends, etc. For this, you should click on one of the character figures and follow him/her through the website (the first step will be map of 'Hispania' with three of the locations where this character dialogues with some of his/her friends). You can switch to another character whenever you like. Adolescents seem to like this way or route, since they can (at least to some extent) identify with one particular character or to 'wear his/her shoes'.

The second way of exploring the website is by issue, and this is not immediately obvious to the user. The different locations in 'Hispania' each contain discussions on specific issues, which have a heading at the beginning of each dialogue. Full details of this can be seeing in the Teachers' Guide chart, which serves as a key to the full map of 'Hispania'. By using this Guide, it is possible to direct individuals or groups to specific issues simply by asking them to 'go to' a particular location.

How to use the website

We suggest that students explore the material on an individual or small group basis focusing upon particular characters or specific issues. Please bear in mind that 'behind' the main screens and pathway through the website there are more information pages onto which users can 'click' for further information (e.g. immigrants and the law, Roma, refugees, religions, words, languages, etc.). A list of these pages can be found within the Serious Issues, so anyone can access them directly if wished.