Guidelines

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Integration of immigrants students

Guideline for Head Teachers

8. Communication with Families

Improve the communication between the school and immigrant parents.
Publish written information on the school system in the mother tongue of immigrant families.
When needed, organise translations and use interpreters (authorised services or parents) during various situations of school life.
Translate the guidelines designed for parents. These guidelines need quite a good knowledge of the language of the country where immigrants live. The parents of immigrant students, instead, often do not know the language of the host country, so it would be necessary to give parents of immigrant students the guidelines in the two different languages, that of the country where they are living and that of the country of origin. The translation of the guidelines could be made by each school in order to support the students and their parents for integration.
Present adequately the school and its objectives to foreign parents and make information on school performances and projects more understandable for families.
Identify among parents those who can act as intermediary for others.
Create spaces for parents and parents’ participation in school life.
Appoint resource people, such as mediators, specifically for the relation between immigrant students and their family on the one hand, and school on the other hand.
Cooperate and negotiate with associations that represent immigrants or develop activities that may be related to improving their integration.
Develop in schools a welcome policy for families to improve communication between the parents and teachers.
Multiply learning modules of the host country language for parents.
Develop efforts to engage immigrant parents in their children’s education.

Publications From the School Safety Net Portal

Building Partnerships with Immigrant Parents
This article, written by Andrea Sobel and Eileen Gale Kuger (USA), describes an initiative developed by an American high school aimed at immigrant parents and their empowerment in school environments through a leadership program.

Training Sources From the School safety Net Portal

Preparing the Children of Immigrants for Early Academic Success
This paper, written by Robert Crosnoe, mainly touches on three types of interventions which might reduce disparities between the children who were born in the United States, and their counterparts.
Communication between the school and parents who do not speak French
The UFAPEC supports and promotes actions developed by schools to ease communication and dialogue with immigrant parents. This document, written by Alice Pierard (Belgium), summarises the problem and presents some recent initiatives.

Index

20 December 2014

Final Partners’ meeting

The fourth partners’ meeting took place in Florence (IT) on 15 December 2014. The meeting had the objective to check the activities carried out since the third meeting of the project and share and assess the in progress results. A special focus has been dedicated to the presentation of the strategies to solve the case scenarios.