Exploring the importance of institutional contexts for the development of ethnic stereotypes: a comparison of schools in Belgium and England

Abstract

This article suggests the usefulness of an ecological approach in studying the development of teachers' ethnic stereotypes in schools. It builds on existing research in this area by exploring the importance of nationally specific educational contexts and school characteristics on the development of teachers' stereotypes of Turkish minority students. Observation and interview data from case-study research involving one Flemish (Belgian) and one English secondary, multicultural inner-city school suggest differences between Flemish and English teachers' ethnic stereotypes. These differences can in part be explained by the influence of nationally specific regulations governing teachers' power to evaluate students, a nationally specific policy on ethnic minority cultures and needs, the ethnic and gender composition of the school's student and staff population, and the enforcement of an inclusive school policy by the school's senior management. The conclusions discuss implications for further research on ethnic stereotyping and discrimination in schools.

Keywords:

• Schools
• ethnicity
• stereotypes
• case-study research
• Belgium
• England

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Bob Carter and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. We are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council, The Scientific Research Foundation Flanders [FWO] and the Royal Belgian Benevolent Society for providing funding for the research on which this article is based. An earlier version of this article was presented at the ICYRNet conference in 2008, at the European University of Cyprus.

Notes

1. While Turkish immigrants constitute the largest group of non-EU immigrants in Flanders and have settled in all the major cities (Timmerman 1999), they are only a small ethnic minority group in England, where they settled mainly within particular neighbourhoods in London. Furthermore, the group of Turkish immigrants in England is much more diverse, including Kurdish people and people from mainland Turkey and Cyprus (Kucukcan 1999).

2. Some recent studies in the UK employ a Critical Race Theory perspective to explore how ‘whiteness’ as an ideology influences race relations in various, usually subtle ways (Gillborn 2008).

3. The names of the participating schools and individuals are pseudonyms.

4. While the researcher interviewed many more teachers than the nineteen teachers included in this analysis, time and resource constraints did not allow for transcription and analysis of additional interviews. The nineteen interviews included in this study were selected for transcription and analysis because the researcher perceived those to have richer data compared to the other interviews.

5. The Flemish ‘Educational Priority Policy’ (onderwijsvoorangsbeleid) contained five different dimensions: prevention and support; parental involvement; intercultural education; education in own language and culture; and (Dutch) language improvement.