Guiding immigrant students through educational transitions: far more than a multidisciplinary challenge

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Guiding students through the educational transitions is essential for their correct development during their educational years and for their labor and social future. When dealing with immigrant students, this task acquires even greater importance, and becomes more complex due to other factors such as the culture of origin, the migratory processes, previous school experience, and the intrinsic difficulties to adapt to the new settings. In this article, based on a six instrumental case study, we have explored this dimension in the teaching and guiding strategies carried out in Spanish primary and secondary schools, separately and as whole, in order to reveal the possibilities, limitations and consequences of such strategies. Particularly, we show the difficulty to put into practice comprehensive interprofessional strategies, due to current official curricular policies and the dominant educational thinking of schools and their professionals. The cases studied show how, for these boys and girls, educational transitions become permanent processes of accommodation, mediated by teachers’ actions, guiding and mediation efforts, and traditional curricular structure, whose effectiveness is low, by the contradictions that occur between inclusive purposes pretended and daily practices to get them.