Teachers’ Approaches to Ethnic Minority Students through a Comparative Lens

Abstract

Within the rich body of literature on the schooling of migrant and ethnic minority pupils, studies specifically addressing the role that teachers play in the inclusion or exclusion of such pupils from the educational community are relatively scarce. Research regarding teachers’ treatment and perceptions of minority pupils has mainly been carried out in the UK, and has tended to focus on appraising the more or less discriminatory or racist behaviour of teachers, and the impact that this might have on academic performance. The debate, sometimes heated, which has taken place among British researchers about the extent of teachers’ participation in the stigmatisation of certain groups reveals an understanding of the ‘problem’ of the schooling of minority pupils which is framed in terms of ‘racism and racial discrimination in school’ (Stevens 2007, p. 149). From this perspective, teachers’ accounts of their dealings with minority students appear to simply partake in a ‘domi-nant educational discourse’ which constructs minority pupils as particularly problematic (Archer 2008). Teachers’ attitudes and discourses appear here as both expressions of their personal prejudice and reflections of an overriding dominant construction of minority students as ‘deviant’. Little, if anything, is revealed by such approaches about the specific national, institutional or local dynamics that exacerbate or hinder the expression of negative racial stereotypes by teachers, or about how their training, professional trajectories, or their social and cultural backgrounds might contribute to their outlook.