- Every year at the beginning of
the school term, Italian mass media launch an alarm cry: the
number of immigrant children grows up in Italian schools and
these are not ready to receive them. The alarm cry stems from
the fact that indeed many immigrant workers use their Summer
holidays to go to their country of origin and fetch their
families. These children come to Italy without having a
knowledge of the Italian language, but have more often a good
school background, although it is difficult to assess their
skills.
- However, the media’s alarm
cry is disproportionate, because the number of immigrant
children involved also includes many children who were born in
Italy, or maybe have already attended the nursery school here...
but the fear that they may not speak Italian or that they may
force the teachers to question their own way of teaching, pushes
the schools to ask for help among those who "know what to
do", hoping that there are ready-made solutions and that in
a short time the newcomers may study at the same pace as the
other children in their class.
- Moreover, during the school
year, especially around Christmas and Easter holidays, more
parents will be joined by their children, so that the schools
have to accept newcomers half way through the year. There are
schools in areas with a large number of immigrants and schools
that have been known to give flexible responses to the children
of foreign origin. These schools are subject to a consistent
flow of newcomers throughout the year and have to cope with the
situation despite the many difficulties. There are schools where
there is just one newcomer who does not speak Italian and the
whole organisation is in trouble because it does not feel to be
up to the task of ensuring any integration or of transferring
other schools' experience to its own.
- Some schools which have had
immigrant students for many years have an internal organisation
that is flexible, able to propose some schemes for a
satisfactory and well tested relational and cognitive
integration, whereas other schools keep on tackling the
increasing number of non-Italian speaking students as a
transitional phase, without providing an organic and long-term
solution. The skills of the teachers, the experiments, the new
teaching materials which have been developed in these last few
years are many and often excellent, but are seldom transferable
because there is no easy solution to the problem: the language
learning of newcomers can be more or less fast, but one cannot
certainly expect that a Chinese or Indian student can attend
Italian classes of history and geography or that he becomes a
sort of cultural photocopy of a hypothetical
"standard" Italian student, having certain
"standard" patterns of relation with his peer group
and with adults, and an external life which is similar to that
of his classmates who are Italian and belong to the local middle
class.
- Often the teachers - especially
those who are more successful in establishing a positive
dialogue relationship with their students - expect this exactly:
the linguistic miracle. These objectives, which are unreachable
in a short time, are shared by the students and their families
and the weight of these expectations is an overwhelming
responsibility for the children who do not speak Italian
perfectly. Next to language learning, the teachers would like
the immigrant students to keep up with their cultural diversity
in order to become a useful drive of cultural relativism for the
whole class. Quite opposite to this, the foreign students would
like to be considered more like Italians than the Italians
themselves, since this is the message they get from adults,
rather contradictorily, who push them towards a rapid
integration not only from a linguistic viewpoint, but also from
a cultural and relational one. In this case, foreign children
deny to remember or know something of their experience previous
to their arrival in Italy and many of them even take an Italian
name.
- The challenge we are facing is
the shift from "case-by-case" planning to an organic
reorganisation of the school with an intercultural approach,
which would make the experiences and existing materials
organically transferable and usable. In this context, some
ethnic minorities are more subject to discrimination and
prejudice, first of all the Romanies. The judgement on the
Chinese families is also one of the hardest in the collective
imagery; the language difficulties are taken as cultural closure
and unwillingness to mix socially; while Chinese parents as a
whole are considered to be labour exploiters of their children.
-
- We must admit, however, that
there is a new trend in Tuscan secondary schools, that is the
arrival of an increasing number of Chinese students. This is an
indication of an improved level of integration of Chinese
children in the Italian society. However, it is still a low
percentage as compared with the number of students leaving
middle schools, and many drop out of school during the first
year. In the many countries involved in the Chinese diaspora -
instead - the number of children who successfully complete
higher education or university is rather high, even in the first
generation of immigrants, that is, children who were born in
China and arrived in the host country at the beginning of their
studies or half way through them.
- It does not seem plausible that
there are different migratory projects among the families who
come to Italy in relation to those who migrate to other
countries such as Holland, France and the United States, both
because the area of origin of both - the southern area of the
province of Zhejiang (and on a minor scale the northern part of
Fujian) - is the same, and because some time they are related
families. Today, many heads of the Chinese families complain
that the children of their brothers and cousins who emigrated to
other parts of the world are successful in education, whereas
their own children are unmotivated and drop out of school quite
easily.
- An element that contradicts the
hypothesis of low objectives as to the children education among
immigrant Chinese citizens in Italy is found in the recurrent
statements of the various hundreds of families we have come in
touch with over these years in Cospe’s teaching experiments in
Tuscan schools of every type and level: many parents say that
one of the reasons why they emigrated in the first place is the
possibility of providing education for their children. In fact,
in China the government tries to discourage married couples from
giving birth to more than one child even by precluding education
to those who are not single children.
- The pessimistic picture on the
linguistic and socialising abilities of their Chinese students,
presented by the teachers of secondary schools with whom we made
contact, is confirmed by the limited percentage of newcomers all
over Italy, by the replies to the questionnaires distributed by
Cospe to 2000 students of Chinese origin (among whom many
problems of social integration arise), by the high drop-out
rate, despite the attempts on the part of many teachers to find
optimum patterns of school integration. The percentage of
foreign students achieving high education is one of the
indicators of a successful social integration of the ethnic
minorities in a country: as we have already seen, the low
Italian figures question all the society, not just the school
institutions. It is difficult to detect all the variables behind
these difficulties, but we can try and outline the main ones.
-
- The language problem is the one
which is soon pointed out by the teachers of every type of
school having Chinese students. This seems to be the first
obstacle for a positive integration in a class and for the
cognitive development in all school contexts. Even when a
student has a language knowledge which is apparently very good,
because he/she can say and understand whatever is needed for the
daily use, he/she will find it difficult to understand more
complex subjects such as history, or the textbooks language
based on linguistic registers that are far from the everyday
language, and even more so with subjects like law, economy, and
technical subjects. Losing one's own mother tongue may cause big
difficulties even in the learning of a second language, it is
much easier to fall into semilingualism rather than succeeding
in learning just one foreign language. However, if the school
failure of Chinese students in secondary schools were caused
simply by a linguistic problem, it would be so also in other
immigration countries, since the teaching of the two languages
is not even standardised abroad yet. Moreover, we must consider
that the possibility of having ethnic minority languages taught
in Italian schools, as it happens elsewhere, does not seem to be
approaching in the near future. Besides, even in the case of
bilingual workshops carried out by Cospe, attended so far by
over 580 Chinese students, the main objective is the development
of students' esteem for their own culture, society, family,
while the maintenance and strengthening of their mother tongue
can be defined a "related" objective, also due to the
difficulty of guaranteeing the continuity of this type of
action. In the short term, the enhancement of the cultural
specific features can be an important objective that the schools
can set so that the immigrant students feel to have a good
reason for a positive school integration.
-
- From the policies of the past
few years we have inherited a large number of Chinese children
who are enrolled in school years much behind their age, despite
the fact that the national law has recommended very clear and
advanced criteria: nobody should enrol in classes more than one
year behind one's age, because besides the linguistic skills it
is essential to respect the whole development of the children.
But there is a trend to keep Chinese children in classes at
least two or more years behind their age, with the argument that
by attending basic classes (primary school in particular) for a
greater number of years, children can better learn Italian and
because at the beginning of school integration there are only a
few problems of socialisation, even with a wide variety of ages.
But the problems of integration and socialisation become
increasingly worse as their age goes up with the result of a
high rate of school drop-out at the end of compulsory education.
Many students who are over age pull back at the eve of the
middle school third-year exam, not being able to bear a possible
failure, being aware of their language limitations and of the
difficulties of expressing themselves in extra-linguistic
subjects. The sense of ridicule then strikes them when they have
to show their knowledge in subjects such as drawing, music,
gymnastics, technical subjects, which to them are childish, or
in which they simply are embarrassed to compare with younger
classmates: for a 15-year old adolescent the idea of being
humiliated face to an 11-year old boy can be unbearable. The
teachers who are not used to having such a wide variety of ages
among their students hardly understand that this might be the
reason for the rather negative attitude of Chinese students
towards such subjects that they consider 'useless' for the daily
life they lead as almost young adults.
- We do not have sufficient data
to draw up statistics, but the questionnaires distributed show
that at the secondary schools the boys would enrol only if they
are one or two years back, whereas the girls would enrol even if
they are older. We should point out that the number of Chinese
girls enrolled in the secondary schools in Florence and Prato is
equal or slightly higher than that of the boys. This seems to
contradict the current idea that many teachers have that Chinese
families seem to rely mostly on their sons as far as education
is concerned.
- Another important reason to
understand the educational backwardness is also to be found in
the frequent attitude among Chinese parents, who in turn
underestimate the psychological tension of their children. Many
parents insistingly demand that they are kept at the primary
school to allow them to acquire all the language background
which is essential to follow on to the next school level, and in
some rare case - facing the opposition of the teachers to fail
the students - their parents did not send their children to take
the exam of the fifth-year of primary school or the third-year
of middle school, so that they could stay on the same year.
-
- In these last few years, there
has been a new phenomenon in Tuscany’s Chinese communities
parallel to the relative improvement of the economic situation
of many of them: various families have started to send their
children back to China to go on with their education. This is
possible thanks to the fact that in China the children of
emigrants are not subject to the same rules of their peers who
do not have their parents abroad, therefore they can attend the
school even if they belong to big families. The choice of
sending their children back to their homeland, so overwhelming
from a psychological point of view, shows the parents' wish to
give their children the possibility to be successful in
education up to the highest levels. In Zhejiang there is an
increasing number of very advanced schools, in terms of
facilities and teaching approach, which have been built and are
maintained with the capital of the Chinese who emigrated to
various countries in Europe. At Hangzhou (main city of Zhejiang)
one school has been recently opened which includes the teaching
of Italian as well as Chinese and English.
-
- Some families argue that the
objectives set by the teachers, that is to supply the basic
language skills to Chinese students, often turn into final
objectives, to the extent that when leaving compulsory school
the Chinese students have an amount of cognitive skills (and
accordingly linguistic skills) which is lower than that of the
Italian students. Many parents complain that Italian teachers
refuse to give the Chinese students a higher quantity of
homework than that given to the Italian students. According to
them, generally speaking, Italian education system is too
'light', and believe that a larger quantity of homework would be
necessary to their children, since they have greater
difficulties as compared to their Italian classmates. Other
parents - the majority of those who have chosen to send their
children back to their homeland - have explained their choice
with the argument that they cannot follow their children in
their education in Italy because they are unable to speak
Italian well enough. In fact, the tendency to take advantage of
the impossibility of parents to check on them is quite
widespread among Chinese students - especially, but not only,
from the middle school onward.
- What Chinese parents who send
their children back to China often do not know is that the
qualifications that they will get there will not be valid in
Italy, if the current law does not change: in fact, there is no
equivalence between Chinese and Italian academic qualifications.
It is, however, difficult to generalise the attitude of the
Chinese families in Italy towards education: as we will see
later, particular situations push parents to ask their children
for help in their job - especially when they attend secondary
school - and this certainly makes studying more difficult for
them. Or else, the parents expect a lot from one child only, in
terms of school performance, who is considered to be more
talented, or from the youngest child, so that the oldest one can
take the place of the father at the head of the family business.
There is, however, a recurrent factor: often parents'
expectations are too high in relation to the difficulties that
their children experience, and they are not willing to accept
their children's first school failure. In particular, if the
oldest son fails he will be directed to work and serve as an
aide to the family, similarly to what happens in rural China,
where adolescent boys must take on the role of head of the
family, with an early autonomy which is not thought of in Italy.
- There is a sort of decency in
the Chinese society, due to which psychological hardship is
neither expressed nor detected. It is therefore quite seldom
noticed by teachers and even more seldom do the parents take
account of it, if not when it is too late to help them from an
educational point of view.
- The replies to the
questionnaires show an uneasiness of Chinese children in mixing
socially: many indicate that the origin of it is to be found in
their language difficulties, others blame it on the difference
in their ways of life or in their culture, only a few state that
"the Italians don't like the Chinese", or somewhat
blame the Italians for these difficulties in relations. If,
however, we look at the replies given by older children, who
attend the third year of middle school or the secondary school,
this type of response is more widespread, especially among the
boys, thus showing that they tend to blame themselves less for
the lack of integration and that the difficulties to establish
relations increase as the age goes up. A tendency to increased
hostility parallel to the increasing age among many Italian boys
towards their foreign classmates has been observed also through
role playing in many classes, with students having different
ages, from the second part of the primary school up to newly
graduated groups of students. Some Chinese students of middle
and secondary schools, who had dropped out of school, after
being interviewed on the causes of this, blamed it on the
attacks they had often suffered on the way from home to school
or on the more general hostility received by their Italian
classmates.
- Only in a few cases did the
students complain directly about the fact that 'the school is no
use': the main cause for dropping out is probably this very
belief, but the decision is accounted for with an element of
major emotional impact both at home and to themselves. In our
extensive experience over these years, we have observed that to
break negative prejudice of Italian children towards their
classmates having a different ethnic origin, the intercultural
workshops are undoubtedly useful, as well as other initiatives
that encourage socialisation and the enhancement of other
cultures (not necessarily those of the foreign students who are
in the class), without commiserating and without putting foreign
children in the spotlights to prevent a negative outcome. In
fact, besides what already said about the lack of perspectives
which accounts more than social tension for the school drop-out
rates, a more serene life with the locals would be absolutely
positive and would lead to less frequent choices of dropping
out.
-
- Italian students who are
classified as 'slack' or 'less talented' when leaving the
compulsory school are advised to attend the so-called vocational
institutes because they are believed to be 'easier'. Supposing
this belief is applicable to Italians, we should point out that
the technical language used in many of the subjects studied in
these schools are particularly difficult for non-Italian
children. It would therefore be a better guarantee of success if
they are assessed according to their personal inclination rather
than to their being Chinese or to their language difficulties
and the consequent cognitive deficiency in certain disciplines.
There are many contradictions, however: often Chinese parents
prefer a vocational business school for their children, so that
they can help them out in managing the family business, or to
ensure a future job for them within or alongside the Chinese
communities. Moreover, if any Chinese student shows some
inclination towards humanities and chooses to attend a teachers
college, for instance, there would be no job opening for them in
Italian schools due to the current legislation.
- In short, our analysis shows
that a fundamental reason for the poor performances at school,
the failures and the drop-out rate of Chinese students is the
lack of a perspective to change their social status and
employability through education, especially if we compare the
Italian situation with that in other countries.
-
- Another important element to be
taken into account is the social and family context in which
Chinese adolescents live. In all Chinese communities in Tuscany,
there is a strong feeling of insecurity, linked to many factors,
the most important of which will be examined below, which bring
about different reactions in adolescents: from the revenge on
their own families - who in their eyes are to be blamed for
having led them into a situation from which they cannot be
protected - up to the need for a social 'standardisation' which
pushes many of them to the extent of removing their mother
tongue. For the general Chinese community there is a problem
with the high percentage of illegal citizens living together
with legal immigrants who, in turn, can become illegal due to
this. Children and teen-agers serve daily as interpreters for
their families, who depend on them even for ordinary
bureaucratic procedures. The most serious consequence of this is
the disruption of the hierarchy within the family, which
increases insecurity among adolescents, whose dropping out of
school is finally not the worst result, as a father once said
giving vent to his feelings: "What can I tell him, if he
doesn't want to complete his middle school year? It's a great
sorrow for me, but on the other hand I could not go on with my
job without him helping me out with the customers. I could not
even get my resident permit because at the Police Station they
do not pay any attention if you don't speak Italian. All my life
and my wife's depends on this son of ours, alone we would not
survive here. If teachers cannot persuade him, how can I?"
Some time it is hardly understood that it is a serious risk to
communicate with the families through their children informing
them that they are not attending the lessons regularly, that
they do not do their homework, and questioning the type of
education that the families give them. Let alone the fact that
it can hardly be guessed what and how much the students
translate, it is to be noted that their absence is often caused
by the fact that their parents need them as interpreters (an
application at the Police Station can take as long as ten days
of queuing up). The children are then reprimanded by the
teachers because of their parents whose role is questioned by
the teachers. It is even more so when the same children and
teen-agers are used as interpreters by the police when searching
their homes/factories or moving them out altogether. Such
experiences are shocking per se, and the trauma is even greater
since they feel they have an adult’s responsibility as
intermediaries of communication and pleaders of those parents
who should, instead, be a source of security. We should take
into account that the clearing out of home/factories and the
sealing up of machinery and factories lead them both to be
expelled from their residence and to leave their job, the result
being the breakdown of the family units who would spread around
other families who would take one child or one parent and often
change accommodation, in an increasingly precarious living
situation. The frequent clearing out of factories is caused by
their inappropriate use as housing. We can just imagine how
these children study and sleep in these factories, during the
"quiet times" of the day, in the midst of noise and
without a desk on which to lean. We can just see them while they
try and switch off the mess and tension surrounding them in
front of a TV set.
- We do not intend to draw up an
exaggerated picture of a social situation by relating this
scenario too often experienced. Neither do we think it is fair
to report it, since the people concerned do not mention it or
even less want to be pitied, laughed at or despised because they
are in such a situation. But this decency is the source of much
prejudice against the Chinese: "If they do not want to be
taken pictures of, it means they have something to hide" a
reporter observed not being able to understand that no one,
whether from the East or the West, likes to be photographed and
seen by another - especially a foreigner who wants to study the
way of life of the others - when he is in a situation like the
one mentioned above. Very often teachers think that Chinese
students refuse to speak of their home because they have been
trained so by their families who want to hide their illegal
status (as if the teachers are the ones to be kept at a
distance, and not considering that they have filled in their
address when enrolling at the school).
- To understand how burdensome is
the lack of a home for Chinese children, it is interesting to
mention what happened in a middle school of Prato during the
activities of a bilingual workshop: during an outing the Chinese
students had gone through the areas they knew better in the
city, then had redrawn them on a map; later on, in a full class,
a large map of the neighbourhood where the school is located had
been presented. The students, both Italian and Chinese, were
asked to eliminate or modify on the map what they did not like
in the neighbourhood. The Chinese students started by
eliminating the factories, replacing them with an airport; a
local student then remarked that thanks to the industries Prato
was a rich and modern city. One of the Chinese students then
started replacing all the housing with a fair ground remarking
that "without an airport a city is not modern".
- In the course of the workshop
on the perception of space, in the bilingual class, all the
Chinese students of the school have to recall by heart the way
from school to their home, with the traffic lights, shops and
other reference points of various kinds: in almost all drawings,
the school and the area surrounding it are drawn in great
detail, whereas a sort of mist spreads around the areas
approaching their homes; the trees, the houses, the bars and
even the edges of the roads disappear as we approach the writing
"I live here". If they are asked to draw "their
home", many of them remark that they do not have one. When
asked how they would like it to be like, some say "We could
not possibly have it, I can't even imagine what it can be
like". Maybe some of them have never really seen a home in
Italy from inside.
- The students who attend
secondary schools are among the few whose families have found a
home and who normally speak about the help they give by working
or serving as interpreters. They often belong to the layer of
the community which is more secure.
- An obvious difficulty of the
teachers in secondary schools is found when they try to start a
dialogue with the Chinese families of students who have reached
the age of independence, according to the Chinese culture.
Therefore their families help them out into society through
education, by paying the school expenses, but do not interfere
in their school life, even less want to be embarrassed by
receiving news - often bad news - on their children school
performance.
-
- In the current state of the
Italian legislation, a Chinese student who completes his
secondary school does not have many - if any - chances of
obtaining a resident permit enabling him to be self-employed.
Therefore, if he starts up any business on his own, he acts
illegally. If he wants to act legally, he is forced to look for
an employment, no matter what school he attended and what the
family capital is. The difficulty in finding a job in an Italian
company is increasingly greater, even for a local boy. The
situation is even more serious for immigrant youths, also in
consideration of the fact that there is negative prejudice
against the Chinese on the part of Italian entrepreneurs who see
them only as possible dangerous competitors enclosed in their
communities. The only solution is therefore to work under a
fellow-countryman who has a legal resident permit enabling him
to be self-employed, thus recreating a job relationship
exclusive to the Chinese communities, from which they cannot
escape due to the Italian national policies. They are, thus,
driven (if not forced) to be employed within what is known as
'an ethnic economy', brought about by the restrictive
interpretation of the Italian law, but that is, however, taken
as evidence of the closure of Chinese communities in the
analyses of most researchers.
-
- On the basis of these analyses,
the questionnaires and the meetings that Cospe keeps having on a
large scale in the Tuscany Region, through annual bilingual and
intercultural workshops since 1990-91 with hundreds of Chinese
students and their classes, three years ago we proposed a
Socrates project within Comenius Action 2. MEET is the title of
COSPE's first project within the framework of the Socrates-Comenius
programme of the European Community. The idea was that of a
collaboration between Cospe, the nursery, primary, middle and
secondary schools having a major experience, in order to assess
and systematise what has been empirically experimented and make
it transferable.
- During the last academic year a
new project was submitted and approved, with the title "Mee
Too - multimedia for multiethnic classes", which has the
aim of extending the experience had with the Chinese students to
study the possibility of transferring it to other classes with
other ethnic minority students.
-
- The keywords of the project
are: interculturality, interdisciplinarity, mother tongue
maintenance, educational continuity, equal opportunities for
migrant children, intercultural training, self-education.
-
- With regard to the thematic
orientation the project is limited to the linguistic approach of
multiculturality. Interculturality is obtained through the
language development and the development and production of
multimedia educational materials. The principal aim of the
project is preparing both immigrant and autochthonous children
for studying and working in a society characterised by cultural
and linguistic diversities. Our project wants to promote an
intercultural dimension of education on various school levels,
supplying educational curricula, materials and equipment.
- As stated before the project
intends to lay down in multimedia publications both the
theoretical aspects of the intercultural activities of COSPE and
the teaching materials developed so far and tested in the
classroom. This operation should guarantee the transfer of
expertise and allow school operators to use the material without
the presence of experts.
-
- In other words, MEET and Me Too
objectives are:
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