GROWING UP INTERNATIONAL

 GROWING UP INTERNATIONAL

By Preethi Joseph

The media has been dominated by political rhetoric in the last few years, with immigrants being labeled as criminals and terrorists. These expressions, at a time when globalisation is at its hilt, seem to bring about sentiments of fear, insecurity and prejudices towards immigrants. With political and religious persecution, poverty and conflict pushing people to migrate to different parts of the globe, countries have to find ways to remodel and redefine their homeland to accept this influx of foreign culture. 

But though migration does allow political safety, better economic opportunities, religious freedom and a safe and secure place to raise a family, it also comes with its fair share of adjustments. Migrants suffer from the looming stress of their integration into the society. On one hand, the new country has the promise of opportunities, while the other hand, a demise of their cultural inheritance. 

Globalisation has provided the development of organisations and institutional bodies (WTO) for the movement of goods and services but the migration of people has no comparable institution. The surge of migration has led to a host of social, emotional and psychological experiences which immigrant parents and their children encounter, some of which are discussed briefly below.

Assimilation

The word ‘assimilation’, one of the most debated topics of our time, is the adoption of norms and culture so as to blend into the dominant culture. It is also described as the ‘melting pot. But assimilation cannot be considered in the social context alone. It needs to be looked through the economic and linguistic lens too. Migrant parents who experience economic assimilation are able to provide their children with material, social and cultural resources that facilitate their successful adaptation to their new society. Whereas parents who are locked into low wage jobs, are not economically assimilated and are isolated socioculturally and materialistically. This leads their children to have less education and fewer skills which send them on a low economic spiral. Skeptics of ‘assimilation’ believe that ‘multicultural ideology’ is a better way to integrate immigrants into society. They believe that migrants should be able to retain their cultural norms, values, traditions, and languages while adopting the dominant culture, just like a ‘salad bowl'. 

Segregation

Segregation is the clustering of students of particular migrant and ethnic status into schools. School segregation is a result of house segregation. Immigrants tend to live in communities with people from similar ethnic groups, either due to government segregation of housing or economic status or for cultural reasons. For instance, every fourth student with a migration background in Germany in the age cohort of 10 – 14 years goes to a school in which migrant students are the majority (Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Soziales 2007, 9). Since peers play an important part in school achievement and socialization, school segregation hinders school achievement and integration (H.Friedrich, 2008).

Biases and Stereotypes

Biases influence what we see, what we believe and how we understand the world. These biases are developed by the generalised representations we have about different cultures. These generalisations we make, are stereotypes. Stereotypes are associated and developed by the information we consume and its source. Stereotypes in a school setting lead to biases in how teachers judge their immigrant students. These biases could lead to teachers grading immigrant students low on tests, not expecting much academically from the student or not caring about teaching the student. Research suggested that teachers’ achievement expectations and achievement aspirations were quite accurate for students with an immigrant background, but that teachers overestimate students without an immigration background and with high socioeconomic status (Holder, K. 2017).

In another study, gender and ethnic biases in student-teacher judgments were examined. The theory behind the research was whether judgment biases are masked or revealed depending on the judgment context. Results indicated that student teachers’ judgments are biased by gender and ethnic stereotypes which can be disadvantageous for members of negatively stereotyped social groups (Tobisch and Dresel 2017).

Parenting in a foreign land

Immigrant parents struggle to bring up their children in a foreign country while trying to find a balance between the norms and traditions of their own culture and those of their adopted country. The manner in which parents guide and support their children leads to the successful adaptation of both the child to the society and the child to its parents. 

As described by Baptiste, children's faster adjustment often creates cultural gaps between them and their parents, thus enhancing intergenerational conflict. The conflict is expressed in 

(1) loosening of familial boundaries and generational hierarchies

(2) lessening of parental authority over children

(3) fear of losing the children to the host culture

(4) unpreparedness for change and conflict as part of the immigration experience

(5) extended family enmeshment-disengagement problems (Baptiste, 1993)

The immigrant children fight to assimilate with the host culture but are held back due to the cultural-value gaps between parents and their peers which heightens within family conflicts (Baptiste 1993; Coatsworth et al. 2000). Conflict over peer relationships has been linked with more depressive symptoms not only for adolescents, but also for their mothers (Coatsworth et al. 2000).

Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian - American author, penned in her short stories, the struggle faced by new immigrants with integration and finding themselves relatively isolated in America. If first generation Indian-Americans who migrate as young adults to the United States do not establish a strong support system (consisting of either friends or family) and yet have children when they are in the United States, they are possibly at risk of becoming highly interdependent or intertwined with their children (Baptiste, 1993 ). 

Culturally diverse families

Social psychology researchers have studied how different cultural experiences and heritages are integrated into a person’s cultural identity (Benet-Martínez &  Haritatos, 2005). Culture shapes the way people think, how they make sense of their environment and who they are. Culture is usually defined as a shared meaning system, in terms of values and beliefs, among members of a cultural group who have been subjected to the same  cultural  socialization experience  (Matsumoto  &  Juang,  2008).

Biculturalism is when individuals have been raised in two different cultures since birth. These individuals may mix the two cultures or switch between them depending on the context (Benet-Martínez,  Leu, Lee,  & Morris, 2002). Biculturalism examines how individuals develop an understanding and competencies in two cultures (e.g., Nguyen & Benet-Martínez, 2007). They can strongly identify themselves with both cultures and internalize them. They have the ability to speak both languages fluently and know how to behave appropriately in both cultures.

Transculturalism

Individuals who have had multicultural experiences give rise to new cultural forms, not found in either of the cultures in contact (Berry, 2003). Transculturalism is a hallmark of globalisation, where people can combine elements of more than one culture to develop an understanding of culture that goes beyond the specific culture. Intercultural contact is a situation in which individuals with different cultural backgrounds, communicate and interact with each other (Cushner & Brislin,1996), and is the basis for transculturalism. 

Researchers have pointed out that in our globalized world, individuals are not always localised into different cultures from birth, but can go through multiple cultural experiences throughout their lifespan which should have an effect on how they deal with cultural differences (Lücke, Kostova, & Roth, 2013).

Performance gap

PISA scores among countries show the performance gap between first-generation immigrant students and students without an immigrant background tends to be wider in reading than in mathematics or problem solving. This suggests that language barriers to text comprehension may be key in explaining performance differences between these two groups of students. 

Scores also showed that immigrant students from the same country of origin and of similar socio-economic status perform across different destination countries. For a long time, socio-economic status and other factors like students’ own motivation or the level of support they receive from their parents seemed to play a role. But the OECD findings suggest that the school systems play a large role in integrating immigrant students – and that some destination countries are better than others at nurturing the talents and abilities of students with different intellectual and cultural backgrounds. 

Still, changes in the performance of immigrant students over time also suggest that education policies can complement social policies in fostering integration. Besides performance, the help provided by the schools’ and local communities’ in their country of destination to overcome the obstacles they face in succeeding at school and integrating into the new society, helped with the psychological well being of these students.

Conclusion

With the role of education seen as a path to social mobility and assimilation, and people no longer live and work in one location, forming many cultural identities and have multiple acculturation experiences. Families are no longer simply one-culture homes, rather parents from different cultures raising their children in a context that is different from their own origins. With this new family norm, we as educators and leaders in education need a paradigm shift in order to groom our students for a future in an emerging multicultural globalised world.

References

Baptiste, D. (1993). Immigrant Families, Adolescents and Acculturation: Insights for Therapists. Vol 19, 341-363

Chandra, R. & Arora, L. & Mehta, U. & Asnaani, A. & Radhakrishnan, R. (2015). Asian Indians in America: The Influence of Values and Culture on Mental Health. Asian Journal of Psychiatry.

Heckmann, F. (2008). Education and Migration. Strategies for integrating migrant children in European schools and societies. A synthesis of research findings for policy-makers ; Report submitted to the European Commission by the NESSE network of experts.

Holder, K., Kessels, U. (2017). Gender and ethnic stereotypes in student teachers’ judgments: a new look from a shifting standards perspective. Soc Psychol Educ 20, 471–490.

Jamieson, M., & Stewin, L. L. (1997). Exploring immigrant students' adjustment to learning in their new cultural setting. Int J Adv Counselling.

Romero, A & Campen, K. (2011). Bicultural Stress. 263-274

Stuart, J., Jose, P., & Ward, C. (2008). Parent-adolescent family dynamics in the acculturation process.

Tobisch, A., Dresel, M.(2017). Negatively or positively biased? Dependencies of teachers’ judgments and expectations based on students’ ethnic and social backgrounds. Soc Psychol Educ 20, 731–752.

Vauclair, M. & Klecha, J. & Milagre, C. & Duque, B. (2014). Transcultural identity: The future self in a globalized world. Revista Transcultural. 6. 11-21.