EDUMIGROM Comparative Papers: Ethnic and Social Differences in Education in a Comparative Perspective

This study gives a comprehensive account of a cross-country comparative survey that was run in Spring 2009 among 14–17-year-old second-generation migrant and Roma students attending the finishing year of compulsory education in ethnically diverse communities in eight participating countries of the EDUMIGROM research project. By inquiring about earlier school results, liked and disliked subjects, positive and negative experiences with teachers and fellow students, plans for advancement, and the practices in interethnic relations in and outside the school, as well as by asking detailed questions about various aspects of self-perception, desires concerning one’s longer-term future, and attitudes and feelings toward others in the neighborhood and the larger community, the more than 5,000 questionnaires that emerged from the survey provide ample ground on which to explore how ethnic and social differences in schools and their immediate environments shape adolescents’ daily experiences and career paths in education, and how these factors influence their social relations, the development of their identities, and their ideas about adult life. The focal aim of the research was to deepen our existing knowledge on how ethnicity – mostly in an interplay with a set of social, economic, gender, and cultural factors – shapes distinctions in the everyday working of schools, and how such distinctions gain justification in differently assessed school performances that, in turn, become the bases for departing advancements. At the same time, it was an equally important goal to reveal some less explored associations of how these distinctions leave their marks on interethnic contacts, identity development, aspirations, and strategies that, after all, conclude in diverging prospects for youths from different ethnic backgrounds.