Session Information
20 SES 06 B, Learning Opportunities for Visiting Students
Paper Session
Contribution
The Vietnamese community in Iceland is isolated because most of its people came as refugees. They came as families with limited education, and learning Icelandic has proved to be very difficult for them. As a result, parents with school age children have limited understanding of the Icelandic school system and society, and didn‘t know how to effectively seek assistance for their children. Also, there was a great number of Vietnamese youth dropout of secondary education.
As a result, Project Springboard (PS) was established in December 2004. One goal was to support and strengthen its participants‘ education and integration in Iceland. The other goal was to activate individuals and institutions to contribute in creating changes in the education system and the society to bring about more educational success to first generation immigrant youth (PS, 2005). To realize these goals PS needed to activate both private and public sectors of the society and their families to take part in it. To assess the success of PS the research question that needed to be answered was:
How entities that have the most influence in the youth development - parents, employers organizations and institutions, mentors, and schools when cooperated together could facilitate youth of foreign backgroundsʼ education and integration process.
A. Portes and P. Fernández –Kelly’s result on their longitudinal study in 1992 on the educational process of more than 5.200 children of immigrants in the U.S.A., confirmed PSʼ findings. The study could only identify less than 1% of the group overcame significant disadvantages in early adolescence and completed their graduate studies. The three factors they listed that helped the children‘s success were: the character of their family life, the active participation of a “ significant other,” and the existence of programs that specialize in assisting minority students.
The character of family described how these children were disciplined and motivated by the family and what kind of cultural and human capital the family‘s brought with them from their home country. Their cultural and human capital usefulness, in fact depended on how it was received by the host country‘s bureaucracy of which they had little control However, what they had control of was the “family habitus:” their social status, their values, their expectation of their children for their future that helped to structure their children “habitus” that would be their advantage to build their future in the new country.
The second aspect was the “significant other” who could be anyone who was eager to play a part in the childʼ life and had the necessary knowledge and experience to be his or her guide to build a productive life.
The third factor was special assistance programs for minority students that always respectful, sensible, and unpretentious to the children‘s culture and their mother tongue. PS, besides being such an assistance program, also provided the youth with the “significant others” and the support to the parents to guide their children. The three elements that Portes and Fernández –Kelly‘s study, explained above, helped the youth to succeed.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Guðbjörg Daníelsdóttir. (2007). Úttekt á verkefninu „Framtíð í nýju landi.“ Reykjavík: Rannsóknir & greining. Háskólinn í Reykjavík. Framtíð í nýju landi. Ársskýrsla 2005 (2005). Reykjavík: Höfundur. Framtíð í nýju landi 2004-2007. (2007). Reykjavík: Höfundur. Koshy, V. (2005). Action research for improving practice – practical guide. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Portes, A. og Fernández-Kelly, P. (2008). No margin for error: Educational and occupational achievement among disadvantaged children of immigrants. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 620(1), 12–36. Sótt 19. nóvember 2008 af http://ann.sagepub.com
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