Nationale identiteit van minderheidsjongeren: Hoe scholen omgaan met cultuurverschil

Many countries across Europe tend toward assimilationism and convey to immigrant-origin minorities that they are expected to adopt majority cultural norms, values and practices and leave their heritage culture behind. From their side, immigrant-origin minorities who are (seen as) culturally different from the majority group, often struggle to belong nationally. Minority national belonging matters not only for the future life chances of minorities, but also for society at large, as the sustainability of liberal democracies depends on the inclusion of (future) minority as well as majority citizens. Against this backdrop, there is an urgent need to better understand the social-psychological micro-foundations of minority national belonging in their day-to-day engagement within often highly culturally diverse local social settings. My PhD project aims to explain minority adolescents' national belonging from the affordance of cultural difference by the school context. To this end, I take a conceptual approach from the cultural identities of minorities. Cultural identities are (re)defined and invested with psychological meaning through their social grounding in ongoing interactions with significant others. I conceive of minority cultural identities in terms of their multiple memberships in heritage culture group(s) (e.g., Turkish or Muslim) and in the national group in the country of residence (e.g., Belgian). Within culturally diverse social contexts, minorities thus express and validate their multiple (i.e., heritage and national) cultural identities. In their interactions with diverse others, they (re)construct what it means to be a member of these cultural groups. Centering on minorities' cultural identities, my PhD project has two objectives. The first objective concerns the heritage culture identity and approaches national belonging from the contextual affordance of identity compatibility (vs. conflict). I define compatibility in terms of a positive association between minorities' heritage culture and national identifications. I first ask when the school context enables minority youth to identify with their heritage culture (chapter 2); and next, when schools enable them to combine their heritage culture identity with the national identity as a basis for national belonging (chapter 3). The second objective is to develop a novel conceptual approach of national belonging from the cultural contents of the national identity. Looking beyond the strength of national identification, I conceive of the contents of the national identity as socially shared cultural meanings. I ask (a) when minority youth perceive the cultural contents of the national identity to include their heritage culture or to exclusively draw on the majority culture, and (b) how their perception of cultural contents of the national identity relates to their own national belonging (chapter 4). Finally, I simultaneously examine how the perceived cultural contents of the national identity and school belonging relate to minority adolescents' national belonging over time (chapter 5). Across these four aims, I look for explanatory grounds in the affordance of cultural difference by the school context. More specifically, my PhD research contextualizes minority adolescents' cultural identities in relation to perceived teacher and actual peer norms about cultural diversity. In addition, I take into account the presence of peers of the same heritage culture group and the presence of majority peers in the classroom, since both minority and majority group peers contribute to the normative climate in culturally diverse classrooms.

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