5.1 Introduction

Migration scholars have often thematized the integration problems of immigrants and their children. Yet virtually all studies on children of immigrants born in the receiving country (the so-called second generation) show that a remarkably high share of them experience educational and social mobility in comparison to their parents’ generation. This is especially true for children of labour migrants (Crul, Schneider, & Lelie, 2012a; Stutz et al., 2010; Wippermann & Flaig, 2009; Santelli, 2001). Despite this, the public debate continues to treat the second generation with deep scepticism. Current, often politicized, debates neglect the accomplishments of immigrants’ offspring (Ettinger & Imhof, 2011). Concentrating attention on the problematic aspects (which are a reality that needs to be addressed) minimizes the potential of these often-ambitious children of modest immigrant origin. The homogeneity assumption within immigrant flows overshadows their internal differentiation. The emergence of a new, successful category of people of immigrant descent, the high-achieving second generation, risks being overlooked, and its potentials neglected.

In many countries, immigration conformed to the existing segmentation of the labour market, as guest-workers were recruited to cover the lower occupational levels. Moving out of “dirty, dangerous and demanding” immigrant jobs (Castles, 2002) proved to be beyond the reach of most first- generation immigrants, as changing social stratum mainly occurs at the generational turn (intergenerational mobility), if at all. In migration studies, social mobility is largely framed as ‘the’ avenue for migrant-origin populations to integrate into their new society. Many studies on the children of immigrants focus on the conditions required for advancement in the educational system as this gives them the qualifications they need to advance beyond their parents’ low-status, precarious occupations. The present study shifts its focus from the acquisition of educational assets – largely studied in Europe (Crul et al. 2012a, b; Fibbi et al., 2011; Heath et al., 2008; Stanat & Christensen, 2006) – to the conditions of their valorisation at a later stage in the labour market. Achievement in the competitive setting of the labour market is subject to other challenges than those of the restricted, less competitive, and rather meritocratic school environment.

Building on the international ‘Pathways to Success’ study, this chapter concentrates on educationally successful children of immigrants who decided to become teachers. Many arguments support our choice of this particular professional field. The mobility argument is based on the evidence showing that this profession – at least some segments of it – is especially open to socially underprivileged strata. Becoming a teacher has long been a typical avenue of mobility for youth with a working-class background and thus, possibly, also for children of immigrants. The process argument rests upon the highly formalized trajectory giving access to this profession. The meritocratic principle mostly shapes the avenue to this largely publicly ruled and sponsored profession, enabling social mobility through education, whatever one’s social or ethnic origins.

The institutional argument refers to the fact that teaching very often entails entering public employment. In many European countries, by far the most teachers work in the public sector.Footnote 1 This is especially relevant for children whose parents occupy marginal labour market positions: becoming a teacher secures them a stable job and gives access to the primary labour market of public employment. Given the relative size of the public employment sector, which ranged between 10% and 22% of the labour force in 2008,Footnote 2 “reduced opportunities for public sector employment for ethnic minorities may be a more important constraint than its numerical importance may suggest” (Heath & Cheung, 2007, 14).

The symbolic argument refers to the fact that teachers are entrusted with the task of contributing to the social reproduction of a society, while fostering empowerment, equality and social mobility for individual students. Such a position might be particularly satisfying for children of immigrants, outsiders whose conformity to the rules of their country of residence has often been questioned. The profession is a powerful marker of legitimate belonging.

The policy argument refers to the growing interest of academics and policy makers in a diversified teaching force as one possible way of responding to the diversified student body (Rotter, 2014; Ogay & Edelmann, 2012; Schmidt & Schneider, 2016). Teachers of immigrant origin (TIO) are the living proof that an immigration society is an open society. Furthermore, they can function as role models for immigrant-origin youth. The fact that TIOs have a migratory experience and working-class background is likely to ensure a cultural and class proximity with minority students.

5.2 Theoretical Background, Research Questions and Methodology

Our study of the career paths of second-generation adults is framed by two main theoretical references. The first frame, ‘first-generation students’, analyses factors influencing the educational success of upwardly mobile youth with a micro and meso focus. The second frame concentrates on the specific situation of socially mobile children of immigrants: the ‘integration context theory’ develops a macro-social approach by considering the impact of country-specific social opportunity structures on the trajectories of children of immigrants.

The analysis of educational trajectories identifies factors determinant for upward mobility, accounting for how the gravitational law of social reproduction can be overridden. Studies on ‘first-generation students’, i.e. students whose parents have not followed tertiary education, provide valuable insights into factors that shape upward trajectories (Mountford-Zimdars & Harrison, 2017; Spiegler, 2015). Spiegler synthesizes the factor clusters affecting educational mobility as pertaining to the individual learner, characteristics of their family context and the role of school at both the micro and meso level (Spiegler, 2018). He introduces an acute distinction between resources, mobilized by achieving students to overcome obstacles, on the one hand, and requirements, conditions necessary for successful upward mobility, on the other hand. The three requirements are ability, motivation, and opportunity. While no single resource is needed to attain high educational qualifications, each single requirement is necessary for educational intergenerational mobility.

Findings concerning ‘first-generation students’ are of course also pertinent to educationally mobile children of immigrants, the subject of many studies conducted in Europe in the last decade (Stamm, 2009; El-Mafaalani, 2012; Tepecik, 2011; Ravecca, 2009; Schnell et al., 2015; Crul et al. 2012a, b). If educational trajectories are at the core of those pathways, recent research projects like ‘Pathways to Success’ and ‘Elites’ focused on another institutional context, namely the labour market. They extended their interest to the way in which educational credentials provide access to workplaces and professional careers and to factors that either enable or hinder career promotion (Lang et al., 2018; Waldring et al., 2015; Rezai, 2017; Konyali & Crul, 2017). Synthetizing their results, Crul et al. (2017) offer an overall overview and discussion of the resources that can be mobilized to reach the social mobility goal in working life, namely individual agency, resilience, parental agency, social support, social skills and ethnic capital.

Grounded in these theoretical frames and based on qualitative fieldwork carried out in five European countries on teachers of immigrant origin (TIOs), i.e. born or raised from an early age in the country to which their parents migrated, this paper addresses three crucial aspects of the respondents’ professional trajectories: career choice, access to the professional field and present workplace experience, and sets them in a broad comparative perspective. Each theme with its specific research questions is treated in a different section, while the comparative purpose of the study runs across the three aspects.

Section 5.3 sets the background scene for our schoolteachers by presenting their professional choice: the analysis looks at the motives and constraints underlying their decision to become a schoolteacher. It finally addresses the transversal comparative issue by seeking to identify whether there are common patterns across the countries under study for TIOs’ educational trajectories and professional choices.

Section 5.4 retraces the process of TIOs’ access to the professional field and their first employment. The questions here are: which institutional features channel qualified students into the workplace in the various countries and how do the resulting institutional opportunity structures define which resources help TIOs to attain a stable position? This section thus shifts the focus to macro dimensions representing the constraints under which individual agency might develop.

Section 5.5 finally concentrates on the professional experiences of TIOs. The central questions are: how do our TIO respondents interpret their role as a teacher? In what ways do institutional factors influence the way in which they interpret their TIO role?

Each section is organized according to a similar schema: it first presents the analytical tools from the relevant literature and the research questions guiding the analysis, it then introduces elements from the fieldwork (exemplary cases) to illustrate the variety of situations encountered in the countries/contexts under scrutiny and finally it discusses the relationship between theories and the empirical evidence, delivering the interpretation of the findings. Understandably, not all 46 TIOs interviewed are presented in the paper. We selected 13 cases to account for the scope of the dimension pertinent to each section, e.g. choosing the profession, contextual settings, and agency. Hence the portrayed cases qualitatively reflect the types of situations found in the fieldwork.

The overarching comparative research question pertains to contextual factors: it addresses the relative importance of migrant-specific policies in relation to all-encompassing institutional arrangements in drawing the opportunity structure for the mobility of children of immigrants. It further analyses how those contextual factors influence which resources are relevant and can be effectively mobilized by children of immigrants accessing the teaching profession according to the specific opportunity structure they are confronted with.

The comparative part of the article refers theoretically to the “integration context theory” (Crul & Schneider, 2010) which argues that participation and belonging of children of immigrants depend on the integration context. The context is shaped by the social and political situation as well as by the institutional arrangements in key social areas, such as education, labour market, housing, religion, and legislation. This focus on the context is not new in migration sociology. For instance, Portes and Böröcz (1989) theorize reception conditions for immigrants in the receiving country as the contextual aspects relevant for integration. They refer concretely to the regulatory frame for admission and integration, which can dramatically change according to the historical period and/or the immigrant group in question. In their segmented assimilation theory, Portes and Zhou further explain various assimilation issues as the product of interactions between characteristics of migrants and the receptivity of the host society, referring to government policies on migration, civil society and public opinion as well as resources and structures in ethnic communities (Zhou, 1997). In other words, the contextual dimensions deemed relevant for the incorporation process are essentially migration-related.

Studying the integration dynamics of children of immigrants in Europe, Crul and Schneider expand the notion of context to include all-encompassing institutional arrangements specific to each country in social areas such as education, labour market. They are the product of a country’s long-term history and the result of the way in which cleavages within the country have been managed and settled: therefore, such arrangements design an institutional opportunity structure not tied to migration-specific issues and peculiar to the different countries. Moreover, this theoretical frame includes “the agency of individuals and groups, actively developing options and making choices, challenging given opportunities and structural configurations” (Schneider & Crul, 2012: 31). The TIES research project was designed to test this theoretical frame (see Chap. 2 for details) and indeed confirmed, notably for the educational system, the relevance of country specific features.

In this paper, however, contextual comparisons will not be based on the national unit of the country of residence, as was the case in the TIES project. The present analysis focuses on the main institutional features structuring the teaching profession. Single countries are subsumed into a typology of such features (see following section) based on the general structure of the respective civil service (job vs. career system) and on policies in the educational field precisely targeting teachers of immigrant origin. The residence country of the interviewed teacher is not prominently featured as it is subordinated to the typology categories, although it is systematically reported in the vignettes for the reader’s comfort.

5.3 Methods, Sample, and Informants’ Characteristics

The study is based on extensive qualitative fieldwork conducted by research teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland as part of the ‘Pathways to Success’ and ‘Elites’ projects. Complying with the general design of these two projects, respondents were selected on the dependent variable of educational success and professional activity. Immigrant origin was of course considered for identifying possible interviewees, while family educational background was controlled for by selecting respondents whose parents had not followed tertiary education.

This paper exploits the subsample of 46 in-depth interviews conducted with in-service teachers, offspring of immigrants from the main non-EU inflows of the last 20-40 years in the countries and cities under study (Table 5.1). The respondents are teachers, active in both primary and secondary schools who have acquired their qualifications in the country in which they are currently working, while their parents emigrated from non-EU countries and did not follow tertiary education. A shared interview outline largely comparable across countries allows for the pooling of the data. The paper focuses on the common general feature of the respondents’ immigrant origin and does not thematize differences in ethnic origins.

Table 5.1 Interviewed teachers by country of residence, parental country of origin and gender
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Among our informants, 14 are currently working as primary school teachers, 12 are teaching at lower secondary level and 20 at upper secondary level. Nowadays, teaching is a profession that appeals mostly to women: on average two-thirds of the teachers in OECD countries are female (OECD, 2014); a feature which also applies to our TIOs interviewees, as 32 out of our 46 informants are women. Our informants are aged 30 on average.

The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Each team then submitted these texts to a content analysis supported either by an analytical grid or by software programs like MAXQDA, ATLAS.TI or Kwalitan. The present article used the coded documents developed by the Pathways teams.

5.4 Becoming a TIO: From Education to Professional Choice

This section looks at intergenerationally upward mobile pathways by retracing how children of immigrants converted their educational achievements into labour market positions and by analysing their motives for choosing teaching as a career.

5.4.1 Analytical Tools

There is extensive research into the motivation for becoming a teacher (for an overview see Heinz, 2015). The literature generally distinguishes three types of motives: (1) intrinsic reasons, pertaining to the actual nature of the job, such as teaching children, and a desire to use one’s knowledge and expertise in a particular subject; (2) altruistic reasons, pertaining to viewing teaching as a socially worthwhile and important job, accompanied by a desire to help children succeed and to contribute to society at large; and (3) extrinsic reasons, which cover aspects of the job that are not inherent to the actual work, such as long holidays, level of pay, and status (Brookhart & Freeman, 1992; Kyriacou & Coulthard, 2000).

Enlarging the scope beyond the traditional analysis of values, a new, more elaborate model of motives behind teacher career choice, the Factors Influencing Teaching Choice Scale (FIT-Choice Scale (Watt & Richardson, 2007) considers five constructs: socialization influences, perceptions of the task, perceptions of the self, values related to teaching and teaching as a ‘fall-back’ career (Richardson & Watt, 2016). The FIT scale, first developed in Australia, has been used in several studies internationally (Heinz, 2015): it shows consistent findings in studies on pre-service teachers’ motivations across higher-income countries, including the Netherlands (Fokkens-Bruinsma & Canrinus, 2012), Germany (König et al., 2016) and Switzerland (Berger & D’Ascoli, 2012).

Findings on prospective teachers point out that: “for most students the decision to choose to become a teacher is (…) because the expected occupation-specific activities are in the foreground” (Affolter et al., 2015: 86). Similarly, a US study indicates that “most candidates chose to enter the education profession for noble causes such as the opportunity to share their love for learning or to make a difference in society or students’ lives. More pragmatic motivators were also noted such as a need for a career change or the perceived benefits of the teaching career” (Bunn & Wake, 2015, 47). Richardson and Watt (2016), 288) in their recent state of the art on this topic conclude that “the main motivations for entering teaching are intrinsic enjoyment and the desire to make a social contribution and work with youth”, while choosing teaching for negative reasons, such as a ‘fall-back’ career appears as the lowest rated motivation in countries where job opportunities are scarce (2016).

On the other hand, the teaching profession has traditionally been a steppingstone for socially mobile young people from the working and lower middle classes (Charles & Cibois, 2010; Lortie, 1975). Today, as in the past, students in teaching programs are generally characterized by lower socio-economic and cultural resources than their fellow students in other degree programs (Enzelberger, 2001). Furthermore, teachers’ social origins differ according to the level they teach at. Primary school teachers are more likely to have a working-class background while upper secondary teachers tend to have a middle-class background (Charles, 2006). Such differentiation used to be attributed to the prerequisites to access training and hence to the length of training. In most countries, primary school teachers could access teacher training directly after compulsory education, while teachers at upper secondary school level were required to undergo a full university curriculum before a short pedagogical training.

In many European countries teacher training has undergone deep reforms, repositioning all teacher training at the level of tertiary education. Altogether the number of training years after compulsory school has increased for all types of teacher training, although the study programmes for primary school teachers are still shorter than those for upper secondary school teachers (except in France). The impact of these teacher training reforms on the recruitment of teachers is perceived differently in some of the countries under study. Studies in Germany support the hypothesis of a progressive closing of the gap in social recruitment of teachers between lower (compulsory school) and higher (Gymnasium) school levels (Kühne, 2006). In Switzerland, however, findings show that teacher training institutions still recruit “from lower, less-educated social classes” more often than other university programs (Denzler-Schircks et al., 2005). Finally, in France the question of whether this reform has changed the social background of primary school teachers is a matter of hot debate (Charles & Cibois, 2010).

5.4.2 Case Studies

Four cases exemplify the variety of educational trajectories and reasons for entering the teaching profession.

5.4.2.1 Safia: Model Student and a Teacher Through and Through

Safia grew up in the Paris region as the child of Algerian parents. She always wanted to become a teacher. As a child, she played at teaching her brothers and sisters. Her father had just two years of schooling, while her mother had completed compulsory school. As her parents valued school success, she responded by being a very good pupil. She was teased in class because of her good grades but at home, she was a role model for her siblings. Studying was a way to escape the many constraints of the family home, where she felt bored to death. The distance with her parents grew as she moved up the educational ladder. After her baccalaureate, she studied Spanish at university and spent a year in Spain to learn the language. While in Cadiz, she was surprised that she was perceived as a Frenchwoman, as in France she is an ‘Arab’. Today she teaches Spanish at an upper secondary level school.

5.4.2.2 Saladin: Following in the Footsteps of a Few Emancipating Teachers

Born in Geneva to a Syrian family, Saladin moved as a child to the Arab Emirates and Syria before settling back in Geneva as a teenager. Although he was a good pupil in general, he struggled with math and was therefore tracked into a pre-vocational career by a teacher who could not conceive that an immigrant child would be capable of following general education. He overcame this humiliating experience by attending the general education track in nearby France. In this new positive environment, a couple of teachers reassured him: his school results were extremely good and he passed his baccalaureate in 5 languages. He studied French at university and became a teacher in a Gymnasium. Nowadays, he tells his pupils that “nothing is decided once and for all, everything is still possible if we manage to have the right knowledge and the right means, each of us can change the world. We can choose to let it be or to act”.

5.4.2.3 Kerim: Teaching as a Fall-Back Solution

Teaching was not Kerim’s first choice. Instead, this young man who was born in the Netherlands to Turkish parents wanted to study medicine but failed the admission exams. He embarked upon a public administration curriculum but felt uneasy in this milieu. He therefore took the entrance exam for dentistry, but once enrolled on the course, he did not like the atmosphere. As he had previously worked as a mentor in homework classes, he opted for pedagogy. He started out as a social worker, but was frustrated by the feeling that he was unable to do enough for the children he had been employed to help. He therefore took a newly created position combining teaching with social work at a secondary school in Amsterdam, helping pupils with problematic behaviour both as their daily classroom teacher and as a social worker. Despite this trial-and-error orientation process, Kerim took a very well-considered professional decision and derives satisfaction from the fact that his work corresponds to his values.

5.4.2.4 Bülent: Seeking Refuge from Discrimination and Economic Hardship

Bülent went to a comprehensive school, achieved his Abitur and studied construction engineering. He is now a teacher in Math, Engineering, Social Science, and Islamic Religion in the Ruhr area, as well as a guidance counsellor at a comprehensive school (secondary level school). After his studies, he found it difficult to get a job in construction engineering. Fearing a difficult professional future (due to the fact that many construction companies were in crisis, in addition to feelings of discrimination), this young Turkish-origin professional was persuaded by his wife to take the available ‘lateral career /cross entry’ into the teaching profession, made easier by a shortage of teachers at that time in the Ruhr area. He applied for a teaching internship and was assigned to a school near his home. Two years later, after following extra courses in pedagogy, he was offered a contract at the same school. He soon obtained a position as guidance counsellor and later as provisional head of department, extending his competence subjects by taking additional training to teach Islamic Religion.

5.4.3 Trajectories: Ability, Motivation, and Resource Mobilization

The primary and secondary school teachers in our sample have a similar social background, in contrast with the literature on teachers in general. The interviewed teachers of immigrant origin have a working-class background. The parental level of education is unsurprisingly low, once more exemplifying the literature finding that the teaching profession is an open avenue of social mobility for children from underprivileged milieus.

Yet the educational trajectories of teachers at primary and secondary level are somewhat different: non-linear paths are more frequent among primary school teachers than among secondary school staff. Being assigned to lower educational tracks such as pre-vocational schools or dropping out are setbacks that are also found among upper secondary school teachers like Saladin, albeit to a much lesser extent. Youth of immigrant origin often mention difficulties during their time at school, ranging from teasing and mocking to bullying and discrimination.

The story our informants tell in order to account for their educational trajectories is the result of interactions between factors pertaining to the individual learner and characteristics of their direct social context. Motivation and ability are the two individual-level ‘requirements’ for upward mobility for “first-generation students” (Spiegler, 2018), like our informants.

Teachers’ narratives are imbued with intrinsic motivations pertaining to the actual work involved in their profession, while extrinsic reasons for choosing this profession are virtually absent. Yet the conversion of tertiary educational achievement into professional mobility takes forms which are not always clear from the beginning. Half of the informants said that they always wanted to become teachers: Safia is motivated by her love for this activity; Saladin acts as a role model, encouraging his pupils to take action and stay the course despite setbacks. For the other half of our informants, teaching was not their first goal, but a fall-back option. Kerim reached out to the teaching profession he had been socialized to when working as a mentor after failing to achieve his professional goals; Bülent’s decision to retrain as a teacher was prompted by a fear of unemployment and discrimination. For these people, teaching is not a ‘vocation’ but rather a mature decision, an alternative way to make use of their educational qualifications and to attain middle-class status from the options available to them. Across the whole sample in the various countries, half of the teachers interviewed did not initially want to become a teacher (cf. Schneider & Lang, 2016 for a more detailed analysis of the German case).

Literature on motivations for the choice of the teaching profession extensively discusses the notion of teaching as a fall-back career among pre-service teachers. In studies that included a fall-back career as a possible reason for becoming a teacher, this was the option ranked lowest by respondents (Wong et al., 2014). Delving into this last motivational factor, Wong distinguishes two types: ‘Teaching as an alternative’, a career option selected by respondents who were experiencing difficulties finding a job or who had had negative experiences in other jobs, and ‘Teaching as a provisional option’, suggesting that teaching is only a temporary solution. While the first type is associated with positive attitudes toward teaching, the second type is negatively correlated with teaching-related commitments.

Naturally, findings on ranked motivations of pre-service teachers are not proper terms of comparison for interpreting the frequency of fall-back options among our in-service TIOs. Yet, the gap between a least valued motive and the recurrent mention of this type of decision in our TIOs sample is a striking indication of the specific situation of our committed minority teachers, matching the first type identified by Wong. They had hesitated several times before taking the decision to enter the teaching profession, after coming to terms with disillusionment and abandoned dreams, especially if they had encountered obstacles towards achieving their professional aspirations. Their career choice is mainly symptomatic of frustrations and hurdles rather than a lack of commitment to their current teaching profession. This second-best career choice is not a matter of individual motivational deficit but points towards painful individual readjustments and challenging labour market access even for successful children of immigrants, framed by larger societal conditions, such as minority status, social origin, opportunity structures and economic and labour market conditions.

Results concerning educational trajectories and professional choices show that TIOs travel along similar pathways across countries; this is not surprising as the analysis was mainly conducted at the micro and meso level. Moreover, the methodological set up of the study, selecting respondents on the dependent variable of educational success tends to black out relevant country differences observed in studies of educational careers (Crul et al. 2012b).

5.5 Entering a Teacher’s Position: Opportunities for TIOs

The necessary ‘requirement’, complementary in Spiegler’s terms (2018) to individual specific ingredients for upward mobility, are opportunities: they relate to the wider context under which motivations and abilities may unfold. While these two latter requirements characterize successful children of immigrants across the board, the third requirement − opportunities − are country specific. In this section we analyse if and how upward mobility pathways differ across a typology of countries. Our analysis of opportunities covers some institutional features characteristic of the public school system, since almost all informants in our sample teach in public schools. We focus on institutional regulations regarding entry conditions and career opportunities or barriers as well as educational public policies.

5.5.1 Analytical Tools

The recruitment and career development of teachers differ according to the general features characterizing each country’s civil service. The literature distinguishes two different ways of organizing the civil service in Europe: the job system and the career system (Bekke & van der Meer, 2000).

In the job system, recruitment and selection are highly decentralized and function-oriented. Individuals are recruited for a specific position, are subject to general employment legislation, and may not always benefit from job security. Such a system ensures great flexibility and enables the externalization of tasks. This system highly resembles what is practised in the private sector. This job system, typical for Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries, is also practised to a certain extent in Switzerland and the Netherlands (Eurydice., 2012, 116).

In the career system, the initial recruitment of teachers is carried out through competitive examinations, based on the principles of merit and equality. As individuals are recruited not only for a position but for a career, they benefit from job security. Their advancement through the hierarchy of their corps is determined by specific promotion rules based on length of service and merit or by internal exams. The career system is typical of the French and Spanish civil service. In those countries, teachers have “career civil servant status” as they are “appointed for life by the appropriate central or regional authority” (Eurydice., 2012, 116).Footnote 3

The German civil service combines characteristics of both systems. On one hand, there is a comprehensive and uniform hierarchy of legal norms establishing a country-wide framework of career categories and insuring clear standardization and job security. On the other hand, decisions on recruitment, personnel deployment, in-service training and promotion are very much decentralized (Goetz, 2000). Differences are found not only between Länder, but also within Länder.

The civil service systems determine the mechanisms for allocating teachers to a school. Whereas in all countries under study, teacher training includes some form of traineeship, the effects of internships on gaining access to a stable workplace vary according to the type of civil service model. In job system countries, internships provide an arena where a prospective teacher can build up a professional network that may be instrumental when looking for a job; therefore, this system opens up margins for individual action. In career system countries, internships have no bearing on the further allocation of teachers, as competitive examinations leave no leeway to influence where they will practice their profession. These general institutional features impact teaching careers as they determine conditions and entry procedures into the workplace and define the scope for individual action.

Yet entry procedures are not only determined by general institutional arrangements but also by educational policies aiming at improving the educational performance of migrant-origin pupils. Some measures directed at reaching this goal focus specifically on teachers. To identify the main features of these policies and their variability across the countries under study, we rely on the Migrant Integration Policy Index. The MIPEX index is a comparative tool measuring policies promoting the integration of third-country nationals in some 38 countries (http://www.mipex.eu/) and education is one of the eight policy areas covered by the index.Footnote 4

We singled out policy measures that specifically target teachers from the questions the index is built upon. For our purpose of analysing entry conditions of children of immigrants into the teaching profession, a key policy action is one aimed at bringing migrants into the teaching workforce. This provision intends to promote school success among children of immigrants and create a diversity- friendly school environment (Schmidt & Schneider, 2016). While it could be questioned as a form of affirmative action, this measure ensures sheltered access to a middle-class position for people with an immigrant background.

Table 5.2 shows that this policy measure is often quite consistently accompanied by other teacher-centred measures in training, so that the three tools shape the professional environment and its degree of openness to the specificity of migrant teachers. The overall picture emerging from Table 5.2 is of a great variety among the countries under scrutiny in this paper: the Netherlands and Germany adopted clear teacher-centred measures. In Germany, for instance, bringing migrants into the teacher workforce represents one explicit goal that has featured in the national integration plan since 2007 (Lang et al., 2018, 105). Such policies seem to be completely absent in Spain and France, while Switzerland takes an intermediate position between these two poles.

Table 5.2 Evaluation of measures targeting teachers as tools to promote children of immigrants’ integration in the countries under study
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5.5.2 Case Studies

The selected cases illustrate the influence of institutional opportunity structures on the ways in which teachers of immigrant origin manage to enter this career.

5.5.2.1 Mayra: In the Hands of a Bureaucratic System

Mayra, born in Seville to Peruvian parents, had been working for some time as a mediator, when she decided to risk taking the competitive examination for teachers in the public sector. She passed the exam and, in the face of her previous experiences as a child of immigrants, was surprised to acknowledge that “the examiner had been fair”. However, because of her grades, she was assigned to a school with many children of immigrants in a village far away from where she was living. Her placement in this school (be it a majority or a minority school) was neither the result of her personal choice nor that of the school but the outcome of an impersonal administrative decision.

5.5.2.2 Ceren: Fitting in the Ethnic Niche

After achieving her Abitur in the German school system, Ceren wanted to study Turkish. It seemed like a natural choice to take advantage of the newly established opportunity to combine this with a teaching degree. She applied for a teacher internship and, because of her subject, it was easy to find a job at a Gymnasium in the Ruhr region, an urban area with many migrant children. Her professional profile fits in the ethnic niche.

5.5.2.3 Dilek: Relying On Her Professional Network

Dilek, a teacher of Turkish origin, was having a difficult time finding a job as the supply of history teachers exceeds demand in Geneva. To secure a teaching position, she activated her professional network, built during her school days when she attended a school with many minority pupils as well as during internships and jobs as a supply teacher. Eventually, she found a job as the only teacher with ‘exotic origins’ at a predominantly majority school, where most pupils have a majority background.

5.5.3 Institutional Channelling

This paper’s comparative design highlights the importance of contextual dimensions in shaping the job search process. The institutional structure of the field may grant or inhibit individual leeway in the process and determine the relevance of the resources that individuals can mobilize to enter the professional field.

The competitive examination system typical for career system countries, illustrated here by Mayra’s vignette, firmly channels a competent workforce into vacancies defined on the basis of the subjects to be taught. In Ceren’s vignette, a policy of ‘preferential’ recruitment for teachers of immigrant origin may make the ascribed attribute of ethnicity more relevant to securing a position, leaving it up to the individual teacher whether or not they want to highlight this attribute. Yet, Ceren is the only German case where the institutional channelling of migrants into the teaching workforce was mediated by the choice of the subjects taught. For most of the teachers interviewed in Germany, their immigrant origin was not important to their recruitment to the extent that the official teacher-centred policy to promote immigrant pupils’ integration might suggest (Lang et al., 2018, 110). While the specific profiles and competences of TIOs are often sought after by schools in urban neighbourhoods with high shares of immigrant children, the allocation of positions based on a career system or the simple lack of open positions in some regions prevent it from becoming a primary resource for recruitment. Almost all informants had been recruited by a school where they had either worked during their training period or as a supply teacher, thereby proving their competences.

The job system of civil service, illustrated here by Dilek’s vignette, gives a great deal of latitude to individual actors. Naturally, both teaching subjects and the supply and demand situation in the specific labour market powerfully influence job search, but informal job-search methods through mobilizing one’s social networks also become very relevant in this context. This dimension recalls Granovetter’s path-breaking studies (1973, 1974) on job search; however, in our case, informal contacts take place within a largely institutionalized context such as internships and supply teaching in the framework of the job system.

As this context gives relevance to social capital, a discussion of this concept is appropriate (Behtoui, 2009). According to Bourdieu (2001), social capital, i.e. personal and professional relationships, procures competitive advantages by providing higher returns on [educational] investment. Emphasizing its inherited nature, Bourdieu’s social capital theory primarily explains the reproduction of inequalities in society. The situation of upwardly mobile children of immigrants is quite different. First-generation students entering a ‘new’ professional area cannot ‘inherit’ relevant social capital. The social capital they rely on in their job search is what they have accrued in their specific professional environment; they are actors in accumulating human and social capital via ‘hard work and commitment’.

The notion of social capital ‘à la Coleman’ (1988) differs sharply from the meaning attributed to it by Bourdieu. Similar to economic and cultural capital, social capital can be accrued by the same logic of ‘rational choice theory’ (Arneil, 2006). The institutional opportunity structure of the job system and of internships provides an arena for collecting a profession-specific relevant network which can be exploited when looking for a job. Framed as the rational calculations of self-interested individuals, social capital provides individually-tailored tools to escape from social reproduction (Crul et al., 2017).

Ethnic-specific social capital can also be a resource in upwardly mobile trajectories of children of immigrants (Crul et al., 2017). Echoing the ‘Pathways to Success’ studies, this type of capital can be understood as the mobilization of the ascribed attribute – the immigrant origin – in gaining a professional position. Yet the examples of the teachers cited above show that the relevance of this resource which ‘turns disadvantage into advantage’ (Konyali, 2014) is crucially dependent on the country-specific institutional channelling and opportunity structure.

In career system countries, individual attributes such as ethnic background are not formally recognized and therefore bear no formal relevance to gaining a position, even if school principals may express a preference for specific candidates during the recruitment process. In job system countries, there is potentially more scope to mobilize one’s ethnic background; however, this was not really exploited by most of the informants in our samples who relied mainly on their professional attributes to gain a position.

The critical contextual dimension required for ethnic reference to be effective is an explicit diversity policy on teaching staff or, to a much lesser extent, the inclusion of migrant-specific teaching subjects. This is partially apparent in the German case. For these teachers, facilitated access to a job is counterbalanced by the risk of being caught in an ‘ethnic mobility trap’, whereby it is impossible to transfer acquired professional, cultural and social capital to any sort of mainstream organization (Crul et al., 2017).

Mobilization of one’s minority background may function as a resource to gain a work position; alternatively, it may be totally irrelevant, depending on the institutional opportunity structure within the various contexts.

5.6 Being a TIO: Interpreting the Teaching Role

Having discussed the trajectories of informants to attain their ambitioned position in the labour market as teachers, in this section we turn to their present situation as professionals and address questions on the extent to which they perceive their immigrant origin as having a bearing on their professional activity. We especially analyse if and how the type of institutional opportunity structure influences two central dimensions of their activity: the way in which informants interpret their role as teachers of immigrant origin and to what extent they are accepted within their professional environment.

5.6.1 Analytical Tools

School sociology literature identifies three major dilemmas and challenges confronting teachers today: knowledge transmission vs educational function; separation between private and professional spheres vs fusion of the two spheres; institutional role vs relevance of personal project. In the exercise of their professional activity, teachers are called upon to position themselves in those various areas of tension. Democratization of upper secondary school has brought into the school system pupils quite different from the two traditional figures of pupils, i.e. Bourdieu’s heirs or deserving diligent learners. Democratization has opened up secondary school to young people from working-class backgrounds who are less familiar with the school culture than the traditional pupils. This means that teachers are being confronted with new social problems and personal tensions (Dubet, 2010; Dubet & Martuccelli, 2014).

The interpretation of the work and role of teachers has been affected by these fundamental transformations (Navarro, 2012; Duru-Bellat, 2015). Some teachers uphold the primacy of knowledge transmission, whereby they must prove their disciplinary expertise and pupils must show discipline and endurance, while others support a larger educational function for teachers who prioritize learners and adapt to their needs (Perrier, 2004). The former shares the traditional cultural ethos of teaching based on a strict divide between the private and the professional sphere; the latter abandons this position and uses their personality, background and relational capacities in their work. In such cases, the teachers’ role is subject to a personal interpretation that reaches beyond institutional definitions. The divide between upholders of knowledge transmission and supporters of the educational function of teaching is more prominent among secondary school teachers than primary school teachers (Duru-Bellat & van Zanten, 2012). Dubar (1996) identifies and names the two different historically positioned models from which teachers can develop their professional identities: the reference professional model is that of a ‘magister’, i.e. a teacher who focuses on transferring knowledge to the pupils; the alternative model is that of a ‘pedagogue’, who focuses on the learning process and pupils (Lang, 1999).

In countries where the notion of TIOs is made relevant by educational policies, teachers must meet two main expectations: to establish cultural links between school and home for pupils from a minority background (Villegas & Irvine, 2010; Schmidt & Schneider, 2016), on the one hand, and to function as role models for minority pupils in achieving (Sleeter & Richard Milner, 2011) and developing identities (Bayham, 2008), on the other hand. Such expectations are coherent with the ‘pedagogue’ model. This is usually not the case in countries where educational policies grant no institutional relevance to teachers’ ethnic origin.

TIOs are minority professionals who pioneer access to a work field that used to be largely precluded to immigrants (Elias & Scotson, 1994). As ‘newcomers’ in their professional milieu, like other minority professionals (Waldring et al., 2015; Van Laer & Janssens, 2011), they may be confronted with a lack of acceptance of their position. This can take the form of open contestation or of micro-aggressions, i.e. “everyday exchanges which send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership” (Sue, 2010, xvi). The comparative design of the paper allows us to analyse whether the type of institutional environment has an impact on the occurrence of legitimacy questions and on the ways in which such thorny situations are dealt with.

5.6.2 Case Studies

The following cases illustrate how TIOs interpret their role and deal with any legitimacy tensions they may encounter. These examples specifically show how the institutional opportunity structure affects the way in which they fulfil their role.

5.6.2.1 Evren: Magister By Conviction

Evren is a biology teacher of Turkish origin working in an upper secondary school of the Paris region. He grew up in Brittany where – as he says – his unusual name did not sound out of place. He thinks that a teacher’s migrant background is a personal matter which has no place in his work: in the public sphere a schoolteacher has to be “deeply republican”. He believes that a teacher’s job is to portray “republican values” and transmit disciplinary knowledge.

5.6.2.2 Raquel: Magister By Necessity

Raquel is a teacher of Moroccan descent, working in a public primary school in Madrid. Her headmaster has welcomed her, glad of her professional competences both as a teacher and a mediator. Despite this, from the very beginning, she has had to cope with unvoiced resentment from the rest of the school staff – from the cleaners to her colleagues – who consider that her appointment has overturned established ethnic hierarchies: “A Moroccan person as teacher?” Similarly, the pupils’ parents question her professional competences. Raquel must therefore struggle to be recognized as a competent teacher. Leaving this school is not a solution open to her in a career system. Instead, she decided to downplay her migrant background at work by giving up her mediator role and focussing only on the teaching side of her job. She has chosen to reinforce her role as magister as she reckons this is the best way to keep on challenging the established ethnic hierarchies in her school.

5.6.2.3 Sultan: A Self-Appointed Mediator Who Enjoys Double Legitimacy

Sultan, a young Dutch woman of Turkish descent, teaches Economics and Business classes at a secondary school attended by many minority pupils. The school not only offered her a job after her internship but also allowed her to implement a business class project that she had designed. She feels that she is not only teaching Economics and Business but also norms and values. She considers herself a role model to these youngsters: because she shares an ethnic and religious background with her students, she can contextualise students’ questions and remarks and students are likely to place trust in her.

5.6.2.4 Azize Bahar: Role Model Challenged in Her Professional Identity

Azize, now an established English teacher of Turkish descent in Rotterdam, realizes that her professional position as a teacher is valued by her pupils, especially Turkish and Moroccan girls, for whom she is a role model because of her immigrant background. Yet, her Turkish background also makes her vulnerable as she feels that her professional position is sometimes undermined because of her ethnicity. When she was working as a supply teacher in the school where she is currently employed, most pupils did not accept her because of her immigrant origin. After being continuously challenged by these pupils, she finally notified her direct supervisor. The school arranged talks with both the pupils and their parents, and eventually the class was assigned a different supply teacher. When relating this incident, Azize emphasized that she had received institutional backing from the school administration, legitimizing both her immigrant descent status and her professional competences as a TIO.

5.6.2.5 Aldin: Token Other, Contested as a TIO in a Majority School

Aldin, a Bosnian Serb by origin, teaches Italian and French at a Gymnasium in Basel with very few minority students. In a city with a distinctive diversity-sensitive policy, quite unusual in Switzerland, the headmaster at his school feels obliged to comply with the general trend and therefore hired a TIO. After starting his new job, Aldin became aware of resentment on the part of his colleagues who are convinced that he is “fehl am Platz”, out of place in that school and that he only got his position because of his origin. He suffers from being in an uncomfortable position in which his competences are ignored, while lacking the resources to overturn or manage the situation.

5.6.2.6 Harun: Appointed as Mediator Yet Contested as a TIO in a Minority School

Harun is a teacher of Turkish origin working in Berlin. He was recruited as supply teacher to “ease” relationships between a 100% “German” teaching staff and an almost 100% “non-German” student body. Although shocked by the educational styles of the parents in many low-educated migrant families, he understands his pupils’ frustrations and daily experiences of hostility. His pupils are glad to hear their names finally properly pronounced and parents appreciate finding an attentive counsellor when their children have problems at school. Yet as the only TIO at his school, he faces unfriendliness from his colleagues: some of them will not speak to him or even greet him. He is left alone to deal with this awkward situation.

5.6.3 Constraints and Opportunities Framing Agency

These vignettes document that the institutional setting affects the way in which TIOs can interpret their role. Strictly speaking, the extent of ethnic origin mobilization is not a constitutive feature of the models of magister and pedagogue, yet these two professional approaches represent frames which either inhibit or allow a productive mobilization of one’s ethnic minority background. The magister model of teaching tends to be dominant in career system countries with a diversity-neutral approach towards educational policy, while the pedagogue model is more common in job system countries, especially when this is associated with a diversity-friendly teacher recruitment policy. Naturally, such tendencies are not the result of institutional determinism but rather the outcome of constraints acting on the agency of TIOs and the implementation of their individual projects.

The French and the Spanish vignettes are cases in point. Evren has interiorized the French republican ethos; he adheres to a strict separation of his public role and private ethnic belonging to the extent that he refrains from communicating his immigrant origin to his pupils. He unsurprisingly aligns with the model of knowledge provider. Raquel’s case is similar in outcome but different with respect to the dynamics leading to this result. Her initial project of combining teaching and mediation broke down when she was faced with persistent hostility. Lacking personal resources and institutional backing to resist and overcome this obstacle, she gave up the more ‘pedagogue’ approach she had cherished. Institutional arrangements and educational policy options converged to exert pressure on her to comply with the magister model.

The two Dutch cases are emblematic of job system countries with an open diversity-friendly teacher recruitment policy. Both Sultan and Azize resolutely engage in a pedagogue interpretation of their teacher role and enjoy full recognition of their competences and ethnic background from the school management board. Obviously, this type of institutional setting does not protect TIOs from being contested; yet when tensions arose, the school authorities provided Azize with effective backing so that she could feel secure in her professional and personal identity as well as in her role interpretation.

The Swiss and the German vignettes are good examples for countries where the job system applies (at least partially) in combination with a somewhat hesitant diversity policy. While their immigrant origin signalled an openness towards diversity, Aldin and Harun did not receive any support from their school hierarchies when confronted with challenges to their legitimacy from fellow teachers and parents.

The analysis of access to a teaching position showed that ethnic origin mobilization can only work as a resource under a specific institutional structure of the professional field (§ 2.3). Here again, the range of possibilities that TIOs have to interpret their role and mobilize their ethnic attribute are shaped by the specific institutional setting of the context they work in. Moreover, the type and degree of diversity-sensitive teacher recruitment policy plays a role in managing any tensions that may arise in the professional arena and in legitimizing ethnic minority background as a resource in how TIOs play their professional role.

Contextual features influence the way in which TIOs interpret their role, as we have seen so far. Yet other social factors contribute to determine teachers’ role understanding and action: school sociology literature points out the impact of social origin in this respect. The explicit choice to work in a minority school is more often observed among teachers from underprivileged families than those from a middle-class milieu (Legendre, 2004). As primary school teachers are more likely to have a working-class background than upper secondary teachers (Charles, 2006), commitment towards teaching in a minority school is more likely to be found among the former than the latter.

A similar commitment to underprivileged groups is observed among the upwardly mobile second generation in the United States. Socially mobile minority children of immigrants, be they Mexican (Agius Vallejo & Lee, 2009), African-American (Lamont, 2000) or Asian-American (Su, 1997), are motivated to ‘give back’ to less fortunate co-ethnics by providing them with financial and social support. Here again, such behaviour varies according to social origin: children who grew up poor and achieved middle-class status within one generation more often exhibit a collectivist orientation, and want to ‘give back’ to poorer kin, co-ethnics and the larger ethnic community. By contrast, those who grew up in middle-class households tend to adopt an individualistic meritocratic orientation, and are therefore less likely to give back to poorer co-ethnics (Agius Vallejo & Lee, 2009).

In our European study of TIOs, commitment to co-ethnics may take the form of individual help to disadvantaged people living in close proximity to helpers, as in the United States; but more often it takes the form of an action addressing a collective recipient, be it the ethnic community, an underprivileged social category or a deprived section of town. In other words, commitment to teaching in minority schools appears to be a specific form of ‘giving back’ for TIOs in Europe.

Our TIO respondents are quite a homogeneous group in terms of social origin, as we already pointed out. Consequently, this criterion has little bearing on their ‘giving back’ attitude or behaviour. However, commitment to teaching in minority schools tended to be articulated by primary school teachers more often than by secondary school teachers.

5.7 Conclusions

This paper presented and discussed findings on inter-generationally mobile and educationally successful children of immigrants who are now professionally active as teachers. Based on a qualitative approach, the empirical material resulted from the pooling of interviews conducted with teachers of immigrant origin in five European countries. The variety of country institutional settings is especially valuable for a comparative analysis inspired by the integration context theory.

The paper addresses three main topics: educational trajectories and professional choice, access to the professional field and professional experiences. Two issues and their interactions run through the entire text: the resources that TIOs mobilize to create and maintain their upward social mobility and career, and the institutional opportunity structure that shapes access to the professional life.

The selection of respondents on the dependent variable of educational success resulted in homogenizing across informants and contexts the individual ability and motivational requirements critical for achieving tertiary qualifications despite initial adverse social conditions. Findings about the resources mobilized for those requirements are in line with the conclusions reached in the overall ‘Pathways to Success’ and ‘Elites’ projects; namely individual agency, resilience, parental agency, social support, and social skills (Crul et al., 2017).

The specific contribution of this paper resides in the analysis of the professional integration and career development of TIOs. The comparatively high share of TIOs in the sample who choose this career as a second-best option seems to be indicative of some fragility among children of immigrants; because of their not wholly successful performance in the education system, they end up resorting to teaching, a career that functions as a steppingstone for young people from a working-class or lower middle-class background when the obstacles to reaching their initial goal prove to be too high.

Mechanisms for allocating teachers to a workplace result as much from general, historically evolved country-specific institutional arrangements, such as the civil service system, as from targeted migrant integration policies, such as teachers’ recruiting measures. The interplay between the two creates an institutional opportunity structure that affects both the entry conditions into the workforce for TIOs and the leeway they have to shape and interpret their professional role.

The institutional opportunity structure influences which attributes can appropriately be mobilized by granting or denying relevance to available resources. As a consequence, professional social networks established during the qualification path can either be practically meaningless or instrumental to granting access to a job. The same applies to ethnic background, which is worthless in some contexts – especially in career system countries – and valuable in others, particularly in countries or regions with a policy of promoting diversity among teaching staff.

One’s legitimacy as a professional may at times be challenged if immigrant origin is interpreted as being a marker of an everlasting ‘outsider’ condition. It is important to note that such challenges and tensions may occur in all types of contexts, whatever the institutional opportunity structure. However, the type of structure influences the kind of responses to such challenges. In diversity-blind structures, the single TIO is likely to be left to their own devices to sort out legitimacy issues. This type of response reduces the personal leeway for TIOs to interpret their role and forces some to play down their migrant background in their professional activities in an attempt to make it invisible. In diversity-sensitive structures that recognize ethnic origin as a resource, school principals or colleagues are more likely to use their institutional influence to meet any challenges confronting a single TIO, thereby giving them support and legitimacy.