Social and educational inclusion of immigrant’s adolescents in Spanish Educational System: an outstanding pedagogical challenge

Abstract

Spanish educational system has lacked of historical experience, concerning the attention to multicultural education until two decades ago, when the arrival of different backgrounds students to the country forced to rethink the educational policies and practices to meet the requirements of this new school reality. The research, from which this article arises, focuses on how the compulsory education approaches socio-educational inclusion of one of the most marginal sectors for pedagogy and curriculum policy: immigrants’ daughters. This research plan has an ethnographic-biographic nature, essentially based on the processing of “unique school life stories” of pre-teens, born and previously educated in their original country, and integrated in Spanish School in the last years of primary education, without prior mastery of Spanish language. The work shows variables and attendant circumstances in schooling and socio-educative inclusion of these girls, as well as dialectical interrelations, which can be observed among: family stimulus, especially mothers’ ones; pairs’ groups, with their attitudinal contradictions; professional stereotypes; anodyne educational policies, ignoring necessary changes in curricula and pedagogical practices. All these reasons favoured didactic routine practice and minimization of some educational innovations, which were taken as a rule by some schools before the immigration phenomenon.