• DOI:10.1017/CBO9780511489891.031
• Corpus ID: 142667123

Acculturation and the school.

@inproceedings{Horenczyk2006AcculturationAT,
  title={Acculturation and the school.},
  author={Gabriel Horenczyk and Paul Vedder},
  year={2006}
}

• G. Horenczyk, P. Vedder
• Published 17 July 2006
• Education

For most immigrant children and adolescents, school and other education settings are the major arenas for intergroup contact and acculturation. School adjustment can be seen as a primary task, and as a highly important outcome, of the cultural transition process. Schools represent and introduce the new culture to immigrant children. Within many immigrant communities, thus, the importance attributed to school adjustment is particularly high (Horenczyk & Ben-Shalom, 2001): Newcomers tend to see schools as welcome avenues to participation and mobility (Gibson, 1991). And indeed, many succeed in establishing a better life in their new societies than they had in their societies of origin. Nevertheless, for many of them, the process of acculturation is a painful one due to the loss of personal relationships and of the culturally known. Although they succeed in acquiring new competencies, many immigrants do not reach levels of social participation that they – and members of the national society – consider satisfactory. An abundance of studies shows that immigrant youth in the Western world insufficiently benefit from schools (Glenn & De Jong, 1996). Too many of these youth leave schools without the necessary certificates and qualifications (cf. Eldering & Kloprogge, 1989). This contribution aims at exploring possible explanations for both successful and unsuccessful schooling trajectories and in doing so it describes educational strategies that may benefit immigrant youth. The last three decades of scientific enquiry of school adjustment in multicultural societies have resulted in a proliferation of theoretical models (e.g., Cushner, 1998; Korn & Bursztyn, 2002; May, 1999; Troyna & Carrington, 1990; Hagendoorn & Nekuee, 1999). We will not present a review of these models, but instead opt for describing two broad theoretical approaches. After the presentation of these approaches we will focus on school adjustment in the multicultural society from two perspectives: the school system, and the broader acculturation context.