The project “PARENTable – communicating with parents of newly migrated children” is a transnational project together with (mediating) educators and parents in order to implement new communication formats and trainings that increase mutual understanding and build communication bridges between school facilities and families. The aim of the project is (1) to gain and share knowledge about best-practice communication in Germany, Sweden, Italy and Turkey where educators and parents can exchange their views and (2) to develop an inclusive training concept for both educators and parents in order to better support newly migrated children between new school contexts and families. Parents can thus gain a deeper understanding of the challenges their children face and at the same time, they can also make their perspectives and needs heard at school. The concept of PARENTable is to support newly migrated children in a holistic approach considering their parents as one of the most important pillars for their successful course of education. The results of the Europe wide conducted interviews will be edited and published as handbook. The training concept will be distributed as a manual as well as further developed into an e-learning course. The target groups of this project are educators and parents of newly migrated children aged 9-15 in Europe which will be gathered in this project. PARENTable will provide concrete guidance material (handbook) based on interviews and hold transnational trainings in five different settings in Germany, Sweden, Italy and Turkey. The handbook will contain in-depth perspectives of parents and educators before, during and after trainings by conducting focus groups interviews. The transnational training activities will be composed equally with 7 parents and 7 educators and will consist of modules such as identities/self-esteem, supportive parenting, multilingualism, communication methods between school/parents and transnational families. These modules will be developed, re-evaluated and optimized by the transnational partner consortium in close accordance to this target groups during the project duration. In order to have a wide impact, we attempt to work with educators that play a mediating role between newly migrated parents and schools and are critical for building communication bridges. Educators targeted during PARENTable will be mother-tongue tutors, mother-tongue cultural mediators that accompany newly arrived minor pupils, school counselors as well as teacher students that assist in intercultural school settings. Our developed training and guidance material later will be promoted for teachers’ education all over Europe. Regarding parents of newly migrated children, we will gather parents who have an impact in their communities, but also who feel insecure and in need of assistance when it comes to supporting their children in new school contexts. National and local integration politics are often focused on the immediate incorporation of newly arrived children into national schooling systems. However, educators and other actors within the school system mostly lack information about children’s family situation and their personal and educational histories. Besides, it is difficult to reach out to parents who don’t speak the local language and lack trust in school authorities. Parents on the other hand don’t have access to knowledge about e.g. multilingualism and children’s identity formations in new settings. They might also be under immense psychological stress which prevents them from playing a positive role in supporting their children. Being themselves in unstable positions, they often put too much pressure on their children when it comes to school results. And finally, parents might feel discrimination and stereotypes from wider school contexts that prevents them from making their positions heard. PARENTable wants to tackle these issues by offering a platform of communicating and educating both educators and parents with a transnationally developed training that is closely adopted to the needs and experiences of families and educators all over Europe alike.
PARENTables objectives were (1) to build communication bridges between schools and newly migrated family, so newly migrated children are supported in their educational path. (2) to gain and share European wide knowledge about family-school relations, thereby focusing both on perspectives of newly migrated parents and teachers as well as best-practice experiences from discussions in 3-days training activities in Germany, Sweden, Italy and Turkey where educators and parents can exchange their views. (3) to co-educate school educators and parents in these workshops on important subjects such as family's identity formations in new contexts, on dealing with multiple languages between home and schools, on mutual expectations and successful communication tools, on issues of coping with psychologial stress and growing in new environments, on how to reflect and recognize different educational and family trajectories and on how to deal with and prevent discrimination in schools, (4) To particularly offer newly migrated parents a forum to make their perspectives better listened to in European schools and beyond.
Integration politics are focused on the immediate incorporation of newly arrived children into national schooling systems. Much less attention is paid to the participation of newly migrated parents in schools. However, it is important to have a successful communication between newly migrated families and schools to support children holisticly. Teachers and other school employees might find newly migrated parents "hard-to-reach", particularly those who don't speak the local language. They might have biases and uncertainties in communication. Besides, they lack information about children’s family situation and their personal and educational histories and questions of multi-lingual settings between schools and home. Newly migrated parents feel often unheard and marginalized in schools due to language challenges, stereotypes and misunderstandings. Moreover, they are in need of knowledge about multilingual uprising, children’s identity formations in new settings or new educative systems. PARENTable aimed to adress these needs by bringing school educators and newly migrated parents in all over Europe together, by co-educating them and by creating and sharing knowledge on best-practices on the ground.