Acculturation and School Adjustment of Minority Students

School and Family-Related Factors

Elena Makarova, Elena Makarova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000179279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book discusses the trajectories of minority students' acculturation in terms of school and family-related characteristics that are influential for school adjustment of minority youths.

The process that ethnic minority youth undergo while adjusting to the mainstream culture is known as acculturation. Acculturation outcomes in the school context can be measured in terms of students' psychological well-being and their academic performance. For minority youth, family and school are the two main contexts of acculturation. The aim of the book is to provide multifaceted insights into the challenges that minority students, as well as their parents and teachers, encounter during the acculturation process, and to illustrate the interplay between school and family related factors of minority youths' school adjustment. Research teams from Germany, Hungary, Israel, Russia, Switzerland, and USA report findings from empirical studies on acculturation and school adjustment of minority students in schools of their respective countries.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Intercultural Education.

Teachers as risk and resource factors in minority students’ school adjustment: an integrative review of qualitative research on acculturation

Elena Makarova, Judith ’t Gilde and Dina Birman

ABSTRACT

The present study is embedded in the contextual approach of acculturation research. It examines teachers’ attitudes and behaviors, teachers’ expectations as well as their teaching practices as risk and resource factors in minority students’ school adjustment. The study applies the method of content analysis and uses a deductively developed and inductively enriched system of categories. The results of the study provide an integrative review of qualitative research on the role teachers play in the acculturation process of minority youth and their adjustment outcomes in the school context.

Acculturation and youth’s adjustment challenges

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees ‘patterns of human mobility have become increasingly complex in recent years, and refugee and migratory movements now intersect in a number of different ways’ (UNHCR 2016). Although migrants and refugees are defined and treated differently under international law, they have in common the process of acculturation that they undergo as they are immersed in the socio-cultural environment of receiving countries.

Originally, acculturation was defined by anthropologists as: ‘those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups […] under this definition, acculturation is to be distinguished from culture change, of which it is but one aspect, and assimilation, which is at times a phase of acculturation’ (Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936, 149–150). Although in contemporary research there are many competing concepts of acculturation, the above definition has been widely quoted (e.g. Berry 2005).

In the tradition of cross-cultural psychology, acculturation refers to changes in behavior and attitudes through contact between individuals from different cultural backgrounds (e.g. Berry 2003, 2006; Ward 2001, 2008). This process relates to the extent to which groups or individuals maintain aspects of their heritage culture and/or adopt aspects of the host culture (Berry 2003, 2005, 2006). The research on acculturation has applied the concept to a variety of groups such as immigrants of all generations, other ethnic and racial minorities, indigenous and colonized groups, as well as members of the majority group (Birman and Simon 2014).

As a challenging and stressful process, acculturation influences individual adjustment to the new socio-cultural environment. Thus, individual adaptation in the country of settlement can be seen as a long-term outcome of acculturation (Berry 2006). Research on acculturation distinguishes between psychological adaptation, which involves individual psychological well-being, and sociocultural adaptation, which refers to how successfully immigrants deal with daily life in the new cultural environment of their receiving country (Ward and Kennedy 1993, 1999). Given the multicultural nature of receiving societies, sociocultural adaptation is conceptualized as involvement with the ethnic community (i.e. interaction with co-nationals, maintenance of ethnic skills and behaviors) and involvement with mainstream society (i.e. interactions with host country nationals, acquisition of skills and behaviors of the majority culture) (Arends-Toth and Van de Vijver 2006).

The outcomes of the acculturation process in school contexts can be measured in terms of students’ adjustment to the school environment, including students’ well-being and sense of belonging, quality of social interactions with peers and teachers, acquisition of school-relevant skills and behaviors, and academic performance (Makarova and Birman 2015).

The contextual approach to research on acculturation

The contextual approach proposes that the relationship between acculturation and adjustment is shaped by the surrounding context (Birman and Simon 2014), suggesting that for immigrants, the process of acculturation unfolds in different contexts while some of them are ‘oriented to the host culture, such as the school or workplace, and others to the heritage culture, such as the home’ (Salo and Birman 2015, 395). Thus, one of the developmental challenges for ethnic minority youth is to balance between different cultures, namely the family’s heritage culture at home and the host society’s culture, which they experience at school.

According to Castro and Murray (2010, 381) ‘context is recognized as a condition that influences many outcomes and their meaning, including the role of context as a condition that influences the process of acculturation’. This framework discusses resilience as a form of adaptive coping in response to the challenges of immigration and see risk and resource factors during migration on the levels of the individual, family, community, and society. However, risk and resource factors at the level of the school – an important context for minority youth acculturation – is left out of their framework.

Importantly, previous research shows that for immigrant children and youth, schools are the setting where the process of acculturation unfolds (Birman and Ryerson-Espino 2007; Birman et al. 2007; Makarova and Birman 2015, 2016). Consequently, ‘schools and other educational settings constitute the main acculturation context for immigrant children and youth. They can be viewed as a miniature society of settlement; schools represent and introduce the new culture to immigrant children. School adjustment can be seen as a primary task, and as a highly important outcome, of the cultural transition process’ (Berry et al. 2011, 326). A recent review of research revealed that conditions of acculturation in the school context impact youth’s psychological adjustment (i.e. their well-being, life satisfaction, health vulnerability and psychosomatic complaints), their behavioral adjustment (i.e. at-risk behaviors, rule violation, use of tobacco, alcohol or drugs) as well as their achievement-related outcom...