School Staff's Definition of Positive School Climate for Newly-Arrived Immigrant Students: Preliminary Results
Abstrakt
As newly-arrived immigrant children exhibit multiple stressful life experiences, schools are often the only service that may offer them stability, a sense of belonging, and social relationships that could promote their integration in the new country. To improve the services for newly-arrived immigrant children, schools must focus on school climate improvement efforts, yet empirical evidence on components of school climate in the context of migration is scant.
To bridge this gap, semi-structured in-depth interviews with four school staff (primary teacher, secondary teacher, nurse, and school psychologist) took place. We followed the research question: How do the staff define a positive school climate for newly-arrived immigrant students? We classified the interview data using the thematic networks technique into basic themes (n=111), organizing themes (n=8), and global themes (n=2).
The results demonstrate that when defining a positive school climate for newly-arrived immigrant students, the school staff emphasized mainly individual approach and teachers' professional development and less the acquisition of the host country's language.