Abstract
As a matter of fact, schools receiving more than 30% of students with foreign background are widely diffused in the North of Italy. These situations have to be analyzed through a new approach of research, if possible neutral and not too much alerted about the risk of segregated schools or classrooms on the basis of ethnical composition. An updated survey, carried out in Lombardy with the sustain of Regione Lombardia’s Obstervatory Orim, has scrutinized a probabilistic sample of 1040 teenagers in lower-secondary schools, attending classrooms with an average of 40% of foreign background’s pupils. The system of peer relations and the student/teacher relation are the topics explored, in order to verify if (and at which extent) teenagers live the multi-ethnicity as a problem and what are the main distinctions or inequality fragmentations among them. It raises a frame more positive than what expected, which is characterized by sense of satisfaction, well-being and reciprocity, both among native and immigrants. Only the 17% out of the subsample of pupils with foreign background (2nd generation immigrants) and the 23% out of the foreign students (1st generation immigrants) have been involved in racism provocations by their classmates vs. the 10% of the natives. Moreover, both 1st and 2nd gen. evaluate the multi-ethnicity in the classroom and the treatment received by teachers, better than the natives, because they feel well helped and supported by the school staff. Among Italian students there is in average an under-evaluation of the professional behavior of teachers – given a certain sense of relative privation - and a short minority (10%) feels the multi-ethnicity in the classrooms as negative fact.
Translated title of the contribution | [Autom. eng. transl.] School relationships in classes with a high concentration of pupils of immigrant origin. Reflections from an investigation in Lombardy |
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Original language | Italian |
Pages (from-to) | 143-162 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | MONDI MIGRANTI |
Volume | 2012 |
Publication status | Published - 2012 |
Keywords
- Lombardy
- attutude towards otherness
- diversity management
- inter-ethnical relation
- segregated schools
- social survey
- sociology of education