Naming and Framing the 'problems' of Minority Youth. a Comparative Analysis of Teachers' Discourse on Ethnic Difference in Europe

To what extent are teachers’ perceptions of ethnic minority students influenced by the national framework of majority-minority relations and the educational tradition prevalent in their particular country? The paper will address this question using some of the result from the EDUMIGROM comparative project on immigrant and Roma minorities and secondary schooling which was carried out in nine western and central European countries. By adopting an analytical framework informed by comparative education research, it will analyse how teachers in the various countries approach the “problems” of minority students and the arguments they put forth in order to explain the situations and attitudes of these students. The salient dimensions of alterity (racial, cultural, social, linguistic) and the labels used by teachers to name minority students, as well as the arguments put forth to make sense of the difficulties and challenges they encounter in schools with high concentrations of ethnic minority, vary widely depending on the national and to a lesser extent the local context. While in certain situations, such as those encountered in Germany or in most of the Central European countries, teachers emphasise divergences in cultural and educational styles between minority families and the dominant group, in other contexts, such as in France or in the Scandinavian countries, school personnel downplay such issues, focusing rather on minority students’ disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds or on their particularities as bilingual students. The paper will underscore how much the frameworks for discussing, explaining, and resolving difficulties in school based inter-ethnic relations vary between countries. For this reason the experiences of minority students offer insight into the cultural traits of the majority society, since they reflect both the national history and ideological frameworks of minority-majority relations and the manner in which student-teacher relations are conceived within the particular society.