Graduate research newcomer parents

For her master's thesis in Sociology, Marrit de Boer conducted research on how teachers deal with cultural diversity in working with newcomer parents. The aim was to gather insights on what is needed to give newcomer families equal opportunities in primary education. To this end, she collaborated with OpenEmbassy and our Home Education Buddies project.

Less effective cooperation

Studies show that teachers often overlook cultural diversity, which can lead to less effective collaboration with newcomer parents. This while good collaboration is critical to maximizing the child's learning and well-being.

Interviews teachers

In order to answer the research question, fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers with at least one newcomer child in the classroom in order to explore how teachers deal with cultural diversity in working with newcomer parents.

This revealed that teachers are generally positive about cultural diversity and strive to create an inclusive educational environment and work well with newcomer parents. However, some complications were identified.

Insufficient knowledge

For example, teachers do not yet sufficiently see cultural diversity as normality and teachers have prejudices about newcomer parents. Most teachers are aware of these prejudices and try to deal with them in a conscious way. In addition, teachers indicate that they have insufficient knowledge of the home culture of newcomer parents, because this is difficult to realize in a class with so many children and because they have had little or no training in this. As a result, teachers sometimes feel inadequate.

Language barrier is obstacle

The biggest obstacle is communication with newcomer parents due to the language barrier, which prevents teachers from going into depth with parents about the child. This hinders the creation of an equal relationship with parents, one of the important conditions for educational partnership. In addition, teachers experience taking on mainly a guiding role in contacting newcomer parents and lack input from parents.

These findings lead to the conclusion that there is room for improvement for teachers in growing the competence of "dealing with diversity" in working with newcomer parents. The conclusion and recommendations make several suggestions for this.