“We would love to, but…”—needs in school integration from the perspective of refugee children, their parents, peers, and school staff

Abstract

Existing research on the education of refugee children has been conducted in countries with a longstanding tradition of refugee integration. The aim of this study was to gain insight into the integration process of refugee children in Croatian schools. Croatia is a small EU country with limited experience in refugee integration. The phenomenological approach was used to examine the experiences and perspectives of the relevant actors. Interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with refugee children (N = 15), their parents (N = 5), classmates (N = 50), and school staff (N = 54) from six elementary schools in Zagreb. Data analyses suggested three general needs: educational, language, and social, each of them connected to more specific needs, challenges, and suggestions. The results of the study are discussed within the Schachner et al. (2017) framework of immigrant adolescents’ acculturation.

Keywords:

• Refugee children
• school integration
• needs in the integration process
• qualitative study
• multiple perspectives

Disclosure statement

We have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes

1 In the present article, we use the term refugee for both people under international protection and asylum seekers, as defined by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2011).

2 This regulation, officially known as “Regulation (EU) No 604/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013” is available at: https://bit.ly/2CWXZ51.

3 The ID number used to refer to each participant indicates their subgroup (RC: refugee child; RP: refugee parent; DC: domicile child; SS: school staff) and the order of their first appearance in the article (in this case: SS1). If more than one quote from a single participant occurs in the text, the same ID is used.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financed within the Croatian-Swiss Research Program of the Croatian Science Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation with funds obtained from the Swiss-Croatian Cooperation Programme under Grant number IZHRZ0_180568.

Notes on contributors

Antonija Vrdoljak

Antonija Vrdoljak is a Ph.D. student and research project assistant at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb in Croatia. Her research interests are related to the field of social psychology, focusing on intergroup relations and refugee integration.

Nikolina Stanković

Nikolina Stanković is a research project assistant and Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She is working in the field of social psychology, interested in the topic of intergroup relations and refugee integration.

Dinka Čorkalo Biruški

Dinka Čorkalo Biruški, Ph.D., is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. For the past 20 years, she has been studying processes of community social recovery after the war, especially in ethnically divided communities, majority-minority relations, and minority identity issues. In addition to the research and teaching engagement, she is also active in the field of public policy, especially in minority education issues.

Margareta Jelić

Margareta Jelić is an associate professor at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb in Croatia where she teaches courses in social psychology with a focus on interpersonal relations, social influence, and group processes. Her research interests are centred on identity processes, interpersonal and intergroup relations. She has been involved in several projects dealing with majority-minority relations and identity issues.

Rachel Fasel

Rachel Fasel, Ph.D. in Social Psychology, is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Combining individual and contextual level perspectives, she is interested in how individuals cope and react when confronted with life course stressful events and transitions. Her work focuses on war victimization, economic precariousness experiences, discrimination, stress, and suffering at work, identity, diversity, and gender inequality.

Fabrizio Butera

Fabrizio Butera is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His work is concerned with the mechanisms of social influence, and the cognitive, motivational, relational, and structural processes that produce or hinder individual and social change. He has been involved in projects dealing with cooperation and competition in educational systems, and social class inequalities at school in particular.