Petra Auer
Elena Makarova
Anna K. Döring
Heidrun Demo4- 1Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Brixen-Bressanone, Italy
- 2Institute for Educational Sciences, University of Basel, Muttenz, Switzerland
- 3School of Science, University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom
- 4Competence Centre for School Inclusion, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Brixen-Bressanone, Italy
The transmission of human values to primary school pupils is key, which is acknowledged in curricula in a variety of cultural contexts worldwide. The present study presents data from the multicultural and multilingual region of Bolzano in Northern Italy (n = 422 pupils in k = 30 classrooms). In addition to class teachers’ values as predictors of their pupils’ values we investigated whether teachers’ acculturation orientations would strengthen the relationship between teachers’ and children’s values, thereby acting as moderators. We focused on the opposing acculturation orientations of integration-transformation versus exclusion. A multilevel analysis showed that teachers’ conservation values (tradition, conformity, and security) significantly predicted their pupils’ conservation values, and that teachers’ openness to change values (self-direction, stimulation, and hedonism) significantly predicted their pupils’ openness to change values. This indicates successful value transmission in the classroom. Teachers’ self-transcendence (benevolence and universalism) and self-enhancement (achievement and power) values did not significantly predict pupils’ values. As expected, teachers’ acculturation orientations were related to their values, but they did not play a role in predicting pupils’ values. Implications for value transmission in the school context and for acculturation research are discussed.
1. Introduction
Globalization, increasing mobility and advanced communication technologies result in new forms of migration in the 21st century, which is creating growing diversity (Teltemann and Windzio, 2016). Such transformations become highly visible in schools as children of different cultures, identities and life stories come together (Fürstenau and Gomolla, 2011). School, in addition to their educational mission, also has an upbringing mission and can be considered a central place of social learning (UNESCO, 2006). Therefore, school nowadays not only is a context of socialization but also the most central context of acculturation for immigrant and minority children (Berry et al., 2011). Taking the perspective of cultural transmission (Schönpflug, 2001), the school can be viewed as a miniature society that children need to adapt to (Berry, 2015) – the school with its organisation, structure, norms, and values representing the values and norms of the system of the dominant society (Hummrich and Kramer, 2017). Within such a framework of cultural transmission in educational settings with values being one of its various outcomes (Grusec and Hastings, 2015), teachers can play a powerful role (Hurrelmann, 2006). Teachers transmit the values they find important, both explicitly and implicitly through their actions in school (Schubarth, 2019) – representing one side of both the bi-directionality of value transmission and the bi-dimensionality of acculturation (Knafo and Galansky, 2008; Berry, 2015). Further, across countries, teachers are commonly members of the majority-group (i.e., European-wide data show that only a small percentage of the teaching staff belongs to ethnic minority groups; Donlevy et al., 2016). Consequently, they can be considered as part of the hosting society sharing different orientations towards the minority group, that is, different acculturation attitudes.
Therefore, it seems highly promising to investigate the construct of acculturation within the school context and combine this with studying value transmission. The present study is aiming at achieving this, presenting data from the multicultural and multilingual region of Bolzano in Northern Italy. The Autonomous Province of Bolzano borders Austria and Switzerland and is characterised by the cohabitation of three language groups – German, Italian and Ladin – and is thereby home to German and Ladin minorities, when taking the broad perspective on the Italian state. From a closer view of the autonomous province, instead, the Italian and Ladin language groups are the minorities (Voltmer et al., 2007; Baur, 2013). Moreover, besides these, other minorities must be considered today, namely, those caused by the new forms of migration in the 21st century (e.g., globalization, increasing mobility, advanced communication technologies; Teltemann and Windzio, 2016). Recently, several authors (Wisthaler, 2013; Zinn, 2017, 2018; Carlà, 2019), foremost Medda-Windischer (2015, 2018), shed light on the reality in the province through the arrival and presence of these “new minorities.” Researching the interplay of value transmission and teachers’ acculturation orientations in this school context promises particularly interesting insights.
Even though, since its inception, the construct of values has assumed a central role in various research disciplines, there has long been a lack of a consensus definition (Schwartz, 2012). It was at the beginning of the 1990ies that the sociopsychologist and cross-cultural researcher Shalom Schwartz starting from all prior definitions of and works on values elaborated a theory of basic human values, which to date is the most cited and agreed upon. Schwartz (1992, 1994) defined values as broad life goals that serve as guiding principles in a person’s life. As such, values are relatively stable across situations and across time. Schwartz and collaborators (reviewed in Sagiv et al., 2017) established that personal values can be organised in a circular structure (Figure 1). In this structure, single values are subsumed under the heading of either of ten value types: Universalism, Benevolence, Tradition, Conformity, Security, Power, Achievement, Hedonism, Stimulation, and Self-Direction. These value types are arranged alongside a circular continuum, wherein neighbouring values have a similar motivational goal, whereas opposing values have conflicting motivational goals. For example, values of universalism and benevolence share their motivation to support and help others and are compatible in this respect. But the pursuit of these so-called ‘self-transcendence values’ potentially conflicts with the pursuit of the opposed ‘self-enhancement values’ (power and achievement) as these are targeted at obtaining prestige, control, and success for oneself. Besides these two opposing poles of self-transcendence versus self-enhancement, the model presents a second dimension, which is composed of the poles ‘Openness to Change’ (self-direction, stimulation, and sometimes hedonism values, therefore the dotted line in Figure 1) versus ‘Conservation’ (tradition, conformity, and security values). Due to this structure, variables that relate positively to one value tend to also relate positively to neighbouring values and to relate negatively to conflicting values. Hence, this structure shows why, for example, it may be difficult to encourage children to be the best in the class (self-enhancement) but also be kind to one another (self-transcendence), as this can induce conflict. However, it is possible to encourage children to be kind to one another while also mastering challenges of learning and understanding (openness to change values).
Figure 1. Schwartz’s (1992) model of human values.
Alongside the theoretical work defining the concept, Schwartz’s theory provides also reliable instruments to measure values in adults (Schwartz, 2012) and children (Döring et al., 2010). The latter consists in a developmental-appropriate technique based on pictures, which make it possible to talk about the abstract construct of values on the level of concrete operations (Piaget, 2003). Even though children in middle childhood can draw logical conclusions about concrete objects and events, they might still find it difficult to think in purely abstract terms (Siegler et al., 2016). To date, several studies (e.g., Döring, 2010; Bilsky et al., 2013, 2015; Cieciuch et al., 2013; Collins et al., 2017; Abramson et al., 2018) confirmed the existence of value structure as postulated by Schwartz in children from the age of 5 years what shows that even at such an early age, children can differentiate values comparable to adults. Consequently, Schwartz’s work builds a sound starting point for venturing a step into new directions of acculturation research - the central theme of this research topic - through the combination of value transmission in the school context and teachers’ acculturation orientations.
As defined by Berry (1990) psychological acculturation can be defined as “[…] the process by which individuals change, both by being influenced by contact with another culture and by being participants in the general acculturative changes underway in their own culture” (p. 235). Formulated more generally, acculturation can be understood as one feature of the process of cultural transmission, whereby the individual undergoes this process by being in contact with a culture other than their native culture (Berry, 2015). As becomes clear from the definition, he proposes a bidimensional model of acculturation considering both, aspects of heritage and host society culture as independent dimensions. The first dimension is related to the question if it is valuable to maintain the heritage culture, whereas the second asks about the value of adapting to the host society (Berry, 1990). Depending on how both questions are answered (i.e., through agreement or disagreement) four acculturation strategies emerge: integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization, which in later works has been differentiated into exclusion and individualism. Starting from this model, Bourhis and Bougie (1998) developed their Interactive Acculturation Model (IAM) by going a step further and considering not only the immigrant’s acculturation orientations but also the host community’s acculturation orientations. Concretely, two dimensions from the perspective of the latter and with those two more questions are added to Berry’s (1990) model: the first asking whether it is acceptable that immigrants maintain their heritage culture, the second whether an adaptation to the host culture is accepted. As can be seen in Figure 2, the combination of these results in different relational outcomes between the two groups definable as consensual, problematic, or even conflicting (Bourhis et al., 1997). As concerns the acculturation orientation of the host community, within a revision of the model, integration has been subdivided into two distinct forms leading to the following six orientations (Montreuil et al., 2004): Integration shows up in the simultaneous acceptance and valorization of both the maintenance of the heritage culture and the adaption to the host community culture. Instead, integration-transformation means being willing to transform some aspects of the latter culture to benefit the integration of immigrants. On the contrary, assimilation implies that immigrants should adapt to the host culture whereas segregation consists of the acceptance that immigrants maintain their heritage culture as long as this does happen in separation and does not impact the host culture. Instead, exclusion becomes visible in the intolerance of both immigrants who maintain their heritage culture and those who adapt to the host culture (i.e., denial of being or becoming members of the host society at all). Lastly, individualism can be seen as rejecting a differentiation between the two cultures as discussed so far and consists in seeing and valuing a person as an individual instead of as a member of a specific group.
Figure 2. Relational outcomes within the Interactive Acculturation Model (IAM; adapted from Bourhis et al., 1997).
In the school context teachers play a crucial role in ethnic minority students’ acculturation, as they can facilitate or hinder students’ acculturation and hence affect their psychological adjustment (Makarova et al., 2019). Previous research has shown that experience of assimilative pressure in school can lead to acculturative stress and maladaptive adjustment outcomes among minority students (Makarova et al., 2019). An experience of assimilative pressure can be increased through lack of support for bicultural development and/or marginalization of students’ cultural resources at school and insufficient implementation of multicultural policies (Makarova and Birman, 2016). Hence, teachers who embrace an integration-transformation orientation can facilitate bicultural students’ development in multicultural educational settings, whereas teachers with exclusionist orientation can hinder development of sense of school belonging among students of different cultural origins. Finally, especially the match between students’ acculturation attitudes with teachers’ acculturation preferences can decisively affect the adjustment outcomes in the school context (Haenni Hoti et al., 2019). The present study therefore focuses on integration-transformation versus exclusion as the key dimensions of acculturation orientations.
Starting from these theoretical underpinnings and in line with the overarching aim of this article selection to provide new insights into the field of acculturation research in educational settings, the rationale for the present study is to find out more about a possible moderating effect of teachers’ acculturation orientations on teacher-pupil value transmission in primary schools, exploring whether teachers’ acculturation orientations of integration-transformation strengthen and teachers’ acculturation orientations of exclusion weaken teacher = pupil value transmission. Researching values in the classroom, including data on children’s values (level 1) and their class teacher’s values and acculturation orientations (level 2) this multilevel study is led by the following research question(s):
1. To what extent do class-teachers’ values predict children’s values?
2. Do teachers’ acculturation orientations of integration-transformation as well as exclusion moderate this relationship?
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Participants and procedures
Respecting the sociocultural reality of the province, starting from the number of pupils in fourth and fifth grades for the school year 2018/19, a sample was calculated being representative for the language of the schools and stratified according to the territorial distribution of the schools belonging to each language (i.e., stratification was done separately for each school system since schools are distributed quite differently over the province). Finally, participants were 422 primary school children (204 girls, 218 boys) whose ages ranged between 8 and 12 years (M = 9.81, SD = 0.74) from 30 different primary school classes (4th and 5th grade). Further, 30 teachers of these primary school children aged between 29 to 60 years (M = 43.86, SD = 8.89) participated in the study. Corresponding to the population of primary school teachers in the Province of Bolzano the gender ratio was unbalanced: 86.7% of them were female and 13.3% were male (cfr. ASTAT, 2021; in 2019, from 4,165 primary school teachers, 3,890 (93.4%) were women and 275 (6.6%) were men).
In a first step, the education departments of all three official languages were informed about the research project and asked for permission to contact schools. Then schools on the territory were selected randomly and school principals were contacted who established the contact with the teachers. The latter participated with their classes on a voluntary basis after having been informed in detail about the project. Since in the Province of Bolzano, primary school classes are commonly taught by a team of teachers, for the present study one teacher has been selected randomly. Parents were informed via letter and gave written informed consent for their children. Additionally, children were asked for their consent and ongoing consent when completing the questionnaires as they were guided through it step by step (i.e., they were asked before starting completion and when handing in the form) as recommended by ethical practices in undertaking research with children (Graham et al., 2013; Mertens, 2015). The project, its procedures and measures have been approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. To respect the multilingual reality of the province, all information material and measures have been provided in German and Italian, whereas for the children’s questionnaire the language of the school was used and if the teacher considered it as necessary, bilingual instructions were given to the pupils.
2.2. Measures
Sociodemographic information was collected from both groups of participants. They were asked to provide information on age, gender, birthplace, the birthplace of the mother, birthplace of the father, and mother tongue. Concerning the latter, children were asked more specifically which language they speak at home with their mother and which one with their father.
Children’s Values were assessed with the Picture Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS-C; Döring et al., 2010) consisting of 20 pictorial items with short captions children need to rank on a 5-graded Q-sort ranging from very important to not important at all. Since, for the used ranking procedure, Cronbach’s alphas cannot be interpreted as for rating data (Döring et al., 2010), measurement properties have been assessed by using multidimensional scaling (MDS), an established procedure within value research (Döring et al., 2010; Berson and Oreg, 2016). The PBVS-C yields scores for children’s higher-order values of self-transcendence, conservation, self-enhancement, and openness to change. Teachers’ Values were assessed with the Portraits Value Questionnaire (PVQ; Schwartz, 1992) consisting of 40 items which portray values of a person (e.g., It’s very important to her/him to help the people around her/him. She/He wants to care for their well-being.). Participants then indicate how similar this person is to themselves on a 6-point Likert scale (1 = not like me at all, 6 = very much like me) (Schwartz, 2006). Mean indexes assessing the importance attributed to each of the four higher order values have been computed: conservation (α = 0.84), openness to change (α = 0.78), self-transcendence (α = 0.79), and self-enhancement (α = 0.90). Both instruments, PBVS-C and PVQ, capture participants’ values in terms of groups of specific values sharing the same underlying motivation as conceptualized by Schwartz (1992, 1994). For the present study, the four scales at the level of higher-order values will be considered: self-transcendence, self-enhancement, openness to change, and conservation.
Teachers’ acculturation orientation was measured with the Host Community Acculturation Scale (HCAS; Bourhis and Bougie, 1998) in a version adapted to the school context (Lazzari, 2009). Starting from the original version by Richard Y. Bourhis and colleagues (Bourhis and Montreuil, 2002; Bourhis and Dayan, 2004) and the Italian version by Barrette et al. (2005), it mainly consisted in the adaptation of the items to the context of reference (i.e., school and education) and in the replacement of the item reference (i.e., in the original version respondents are asked to give a judgement concerning immigrants, whereas in the adapted version this judgement refers to students being children of immigrants; Lazzari, 2009). As such, the instrument allows gathering teachers’ acculturation attitudes with respect to immigrant students on six scales (i.e., assimilationism, segregationism, exclusionism, individualism, integrationism, integrationism-transformation) and in different domains (Montreuil et al., 2004). Within the empirical work underlying the present contribution teachers’ acculturation attitudes have been collected in three domains related to the school context: culture, values, and education. Participants need to indicate how much they agree with a statement on a 7-point Likert-Scale (1 = do not agree at all, 4 = neither nor, 7 = totally agree). The instrument is based on the Interactive Acculturation Model (Bourhis et al., 1997) constituting one dimension of the bi-dimensional understanding of acculturation, that is, the dimension of the hosting society. In this study, we focus on the two scales of integrationism-transformation (α = 0.74) and exclusionism (α = 0.93). Mean scores for these two scales were computed from the items belonging to each.
2.3. Data analysis
2.3.1. Preliminary analyses
Descriptive statistics of children’s and teachers’ higher order values have been produced to understand which values both participant groups consider as most and least important. In the same vein, descriptive statistics on teachers’ acculturation orientations allowed to understand which of them teachers overall agree most and with which ones instead they most strongly disagree. Additionally, in line with prior studies on parent–child value similarity (Döring et al., 2017), Pearson correlations of teachers’ higher-order values and their acculturation attitudes have been conducted to determine a relationship between them. Further preliminary analyses were performed to ensure assumptions as needed to be met for mixed models. Normal distribution of the data on the student level has been tested by means of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov and Shapiro–Wilk tests. Additionally, as the sample size was large, the mean and 5% trimmed mean, histograms, normal Q-Q plots, detrended normal Q-Q plots, and boxplots were inspected. All of the analyses were conducted in IBM SPSS 26. Further, as reported by Bachmann (1998) at least 30 groups are considered optimal to discover existing relationships, whereas the number of individuals within these groups is less important. Therefore, the present data set fulfils this further prerequisite for the calculation of multilevel analyses.
2.3.2. Mixed model
Since data have been measured on two different levels (i.e., teachers’ values and acculturation orientations on the classroom level and children’s values on the students’ level) data has been analysed through multilevel modelling. Overall, 8 mixed models were applied to analyse the effects of teachers’ four higher-order values and the two acculturation orientations on children’s higher-order values. Additionally, the interaction effect between both independent variables has been added to the model (see Figure 3). The analysis was run in jamovi version 2.3 (The jamovi project, 2022) using the GAMLj module (Gallucci, 2019). For each model, we started by entering children’s values as the dependent variable and the class code as the cluster variable. We then proceeded with adding teacher’s values as a predictor. In a third step we added teacher’s acculturation orientation as well as the interaction between both. Consequently, each of the final models included one dependent variable and two covariates as well as the interaction of the latter. For instance, using REML fit, we set students’ self-transcendence values (C_SelfT) as the dependent variables, teachers’ self-transcendence values (T_SelfT) and integration-transformation orientation (INT-TRA) as covariates, which have been centred, and the class code as the cluster variable. The latter was further set as random intercept, whereas T_SelfT, INT-TRA and the interaction T_SelfT * INT-TRA were set as fixed effects: C_SelfT ~ 1 + T_SelfT + INT-TRA+(1 | code_class).
Figure 3. Conceptual diagram of the mixed model.
3. Results
3.1. Children’s and teachers’ higher order values
As can be seen from Table 1, both, teachers and children rate self-transcendence as being most important and self-enhancement as being least important. Instead, for the children openness to change appears as ranking at position 2 and conservation at position 3, whereas for the teachers conservation is ranked second and openness to change third.
Table 1. Means, standard deviations and ranking position of children’s and teachers’ higher order values.
3.2. Teachers’ acculturation orientations
Teachers agreed to a larger extent with the acculturation orientation integrationism-transformation (M = 2.97, SD = 1.40), than they did with the acculturation orientation of exclusionism (M = 2.30; SD = 1.49).
3.3. Correlations between children and teachers’ higher order values and acculturation orientation
The relationship between children’s and teachers’ higher order values and acculturation orientation was investigated using Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient. The results are displayed in Table 2.
Table 2. Pearson product–moment correlations between children’s and teachers’ higher order values and teachers’ acculturation orientations.
3.4. Teachers’ values and acculturation orientations as predictors of children’s values
In a first step, we computed intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) to assess how much variance in the children’s values is due to heterogeneity of individuals (child and class level). The ICCs for the four higher-order values were: 0.01 (LRT = 0.37, p = 0.542) for self-transcendence, 0.12 (LRT = 18.8, p < 0.001) for conservation, 0.12 (LRT = 16.4, p < 0.001) self-enhancement, and 0.05 (LRT = 4.78, p = 0.029) for openness to change. The ICCS specify to what extent children’s values differ between classrooms. Typically, they should be higher than 0.05 to justify that a multilevel analysis is indicated (Tausendpfund, 2020). Even though, ICC for self-transcendence was lower, the conceptual background of the value system justified a multilevel analysis for all four higher order values.
To investigate (a) to what extent children’s values were predicted by their class-teacher’s values and (b) whether teachers acculturation orientations of integration-transformation as well as exclusion moderate this relationship, we computed eight (4 higher-order values × 2 acculturation orientations) multilevel models. We entered teachers’ values as predictors in a first step and then added teachers’ acculturation orientations as direct predictor and moderator in a second step.
Table 3 presents the random intercept fixed slopes models for the prediction of children’s values from their teachers’ values. We found that teachers’ conservation values significantly predict children’s conservation values, and that teachers’ openness to change values significantly predict children’s openness to change values. We did not find a significant prediction for self-transcendence and self-enhancement values. The ICCs for the four higher-order values changed as follows: 0.02 (LRT = 0.57, p = 0.449) for self-transcendence, 0.09 (LRT = 14.1, p < 0.001) for conservation, 0.12 (LRT = 17.4, p < 0.001) self-enhancement, and 0.04 (LRT = 2.54, p = 0.111) for openness to change. Diminishing ICCs for conservation and openness to change indicate that teachers’ values explain part of the variance of class-related differences in these values but not all of it. Therefore, it can be interpreted that the effect still expresses stronger causality, which the variables included in the model cannot prove.
Table 3. Predicting children’s values from teachers’ values.
When we entered teachers’ acculturation orientations in a second step (Tables 4, 5), we found that neither integration-transformation nor exclusion orientations moderated the relationship between teachers’ and children’s values. Teachers’ acculturation orientations were also not a direct predictor of children’s values. Figure 4 displays significant causal connections.
Table 4. Fixed effects parameter estimates for the models with integration-transformation as moderator.
Table 5. Fixed effects parameter estimates for the models with exclusion as moderator.
Figure 4. The multilevel moderation effect of teachers’ values and acculturation orientation on children’s values. ** p < 0.01 level, * p < 0.05 level. Standard errors are reported in parentheses.
4. Discussion
The present article provides insights into a study investigating the concept of acculturation (Berry, 2015) in the school context through the connection with the concept of personal values (Schwartz, 1992, 1994) by researching the interplay of teachers’ acculturation orientations and value transmission. Overall, referring to the first research question, it was found that teachers’ conservation values significantly predicted their pupils’ conservation values, and that teachers’ openness to change values significantly predicted their pupils’ openness to change values, what can be interpreted as a successful value transmission. Further, teachers’ acculturation orientations were significantly related to their values. However, none of the acculturation orientations showed acting as a moderator in the prediction of pupils’ values. Thus, the second research question needs to be negated.
The evidence of similarity of values between teachers and pupils for conservation and openness to change values as shown in the significant correlations and by the predicting role of teachers’ values on pupils’ values might be a first key finding of the present investigation since only very few studies have actually investigated teacher-child value similarities. In line with the study by Knafo and Schwartz (2004, 2012) on parent–child value congruence, it can be interpreted as the result of a successful value transmission from teachers to pupils but may also be the result of a successful transmission in the opposite direction from pupils to teachers (Knafo and Galansky, 2008). Against the backdrop of cultural transmission (Schönpflug, 2001) and the understanding of values as being one of its various outcomes (Grusec and Hastings, 2015), the present study was able to show that teachers play a key role in value transmission and consequently also in acculturation processes in the school context. Since teachers transmit their values, both explicitly and implicitly, in school (Schubarth, 2019), teachers might acknowledge the importance of their personal values in order to be more aware about what is important to them and how they impact their students’ values. However, future research should investigate also the opposite direction, namely if and how teachers’ values are predicted by their pupils’ values. Unfortunately, the design of the present study did not allow to have insights in this second pathway of values transmission (Knafo and Galansky, 2008).
Since the present study was the first to investigate the relationship between teachers’ integrationist and exclusionist acculturation orientations and their values in the school context, it contributes to the research topic of acculturation and education by providing a possible new pathway of conceptual and methodological approaches in acculturation research. Therefore, the correlations between these two concepts can be considered a further crucial result. More precisely, integration-transformation showed a significant correlation with openness to change and a significant negative one with conservation. This indicates that teachers who agree with integration-transformation (i.e., willing to transform some aspects of the own culture to benefit the integration of minorities) attribute higher importance to openness to change (i.e., independent thinking and action and the preference for change), but less importance to conservation values (i.e., obedient self-restraint, preservation of security and traditions). Instead, exclusion (i.e., total denial of minorities, be it minorities who maintain their heritage culture, be it those who adapt to the host culture) shows significant positive correlations with conservation and self-enhancement (i.e., striving for one’s own success and dominance over others) and a negative one with self-transcendence (i.e., acceptance of others as equal individuals and benevolence towards others) revealing that teacher’s agreement with exclusion is related to more importance attributed to conservation and self-enhancement, but less to self-transcendence. Consequently, the two acculturation orientations are not only related to specific values, but also mirror the circular motivational structure of the theoretical model (Schwartz, 1992, 1994) as it was shown in prior studies for behavior (e.g., Bardi and Schwartz, 2003; Schwartz, 2010). This leads to the fact that the relationship between behavior and values always needs to be seen as a relationship with the whole set of the ten basic human values, because even those values not showing any relationship with a particular behavior are still important for its interpretation and understanding (Sagiv and Roccas, 2017). For example, Schwartz (2010) was able to show that accepting immigrants not only correlates most positively with universalism, but also most negatively with the opposed value type security. Moreover, the correlations strictly followed the circular value structure, that is, starting from universalism and following the circle in both directions to security where the correlations decrease and become negative. Therefore, it seems promising and important to study acculturation orientations in combination with or through values and value transmission, since the latter can be defined as underlying attitudes or orientations (Schwartz, 2012). As the present study could show, the two opposing acculturation orientations are related to opposed values, what leads to the hypothesis that this in part also explains why the combination of these two results in a problematic relational outcome within the Interactive Acculturation Model (Bourhis et al., 1997; see Figure 2). Further studies involving both, teachers and student’s acculturation orientations, are needed to draw a clear empirical evidence.
Teachers’ acculturation orientations are not related to their pupils’ values in this study, neither as direct predictors nor as moderators. Hence, it can be deduced that teachers’ values are the stronger and more relevant predictors for children’s values than teachers’ acculturation orientations. In a similar vein, Barni et al. (2018) showed that teachers’ values and the values teachers want their students to endorse determined their teaching styles. Teachers rating self-transcendence and openness to change higher and self-enhancement lower adopted an authoritative style, which has been shown to be the most beneficial for students (Buskist and Benassi, 2012). The authors (Barni et al., 2018) conclude that authoritative teachers are guided by putting their focus on their students (i.e., “other-oriented style”) instead of on themselves. The findings of the present study would sustain such an interpretation and can add that teachers who are oriented more towards the others also hold the more beneficial acculturation orientation (Makarova et al., 2019). Taken together, the findings may further lead to the conclusion that investigating teachers’ values and their relationship with other attitudes and orientations tied to teachers acting as professionals seems to be an important and promising field, not only for research but also for teacher education. Even though values are defined to be relatively stable over time (Rokeach, 1973), it was shown that one’s values can change (Bardi and Goodwin, 2011; Sagiv and Roccas, 2017). Further, there exists empirical evidence, that individuals adapt their values to different contexts, resulting in a change of the importance of specific values in that situation (Daniel et al., 2012) and that if norms strictly tell us how to behave in a certain situation, internal factors become less influencing (Roccas and Sagiv, 2010, p. 34). Hence, raising the awareness of values as principles guiding human action can be considered an important aspect for the professionalization of teachers. For example, through a framework of inclusive values building the starting point for the development of more inclusive schools (Booth and Ainscow, 2017), which would also sustain and positively affect the acculturation of minority students (Makarova and Birman, 2016; Makarova et al., 2019). Although the present study provides important first findings on the relationship between acculturation and value transmission in the school context, it has some limitations which need to be enclosed. First, the nature of cross-sectional data (i.e., dependent and independent variables are measured once and at the same timepoint) leads to the limitation that the temporal cannot be determined. Longitudinal data would provide more detailed insights in value transmission, because only by continuously recording values and acculturation orientations lines of development can be traced. Further, within the multicultural situation of the province, such longitudinal study might be designed in a cultural comparative way to examine whether value transmission and the role of acculturation orientations follow a universal course or rather show cultural specificities (Boehnke, 2018). Another limitation of the present study was the fact that only very few variables were included in the model and consequently it was not able to explain the whole variance of classroom-related differences in the importance children attribute to specific values. Similarly, the fact that only one teacher of the teacher team has been selected and that this selection was made randomly leads to the limitation, that not all teachers’ values impact was considered. Future studies should account for the values of all teachers teaching the respective class or at least those teaching it for a certain minimum of hours. In this way the reality of children being confronted with the value hierarchies of their different teachers could be respected. Instead, regarding the concept of acculturation and the multicultural situation of the province consisting of a complex situation of “old” and “new” minorities (Medda-Windischer, 2015, 2018) and difficulties to clearly define who is the minority (Baur, 2013) the theoretical model by Bourhis and Bougie (1998) might not be able to fully account for such realities. However, from this limitation, possibilities and initial ideas for a revision or extension could arise, providing a model and related instruments which respect and fully fit also to more complex multicultural contexts were a distinction between minorities and majority is not always possible. Finally, the study was clearly limited by the fact that only teachers’ acculturation orientations were included but not pupils’ acculturation strategies. To be able to capture acculturation in its entirety as a two-dimensional process (Berry, 2015) including both variables seems to be a necessary desideratum for future research.
To conclude, the study presented in this article as one of the first investigated acculturation in the school context in connection with values transmission seen as one possible outcome of cultural transmission (Schönpflug, 2001). As such it can provide preliminary insights into the extent to which teachers’ values and acculturation orientations predict pupils’ values. It demonstrates the utility of investigating acculturation processes also from the perspective of value transmission in the classroom and, at the same time, through its owns limitations, underlines the necessity to do so in line with the theoretical conception of both, values and acculturation, as bidirectional or bidimensional processes (Knafo and Galansky, 2008; Berry, 2015).
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.
Ethics statement
The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Research Ethics Committee of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.
Author contributions
PA, EM, AD, and HD equally contributed to the design and conceptual idea of the manuscript. PA wrote the whole draft, did the data collection and the statistical analyses. EM wrote parts of the introduction and discussion and revised the manuscript at different timepoints. AD wrote the abstract, different parts in the whole manuscript and took part in the statistical analyses. HD was involved in the original conceptualization of the study, the translation process of the HCAS items and reviewed the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
Funding
The funding for Open Access was provided by the University Library of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all of the children and teachers who participated in the study. Further, they thank the school principals and school authorities of the Province of Bolzano for the permission of working with the schools.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
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Keywords: acculturation, acculturation orientations, personal values, value transmission, primary school
Citation: Auer P, Makarova E, Döring AK and Demo H (2023) Value transmission in primary schools: are teachers’ acculturation orientations a moderator? Front. Educ. 8:1136303. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2023.1136303
Edited by:
Pei Sun, Tsinghua University, ChinaReviewed by:
Rail Shamionov, Saratov State University, RussiaYasmin Ahmad, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia
Copyright © 2023 Auer, Makarova, Döring and Demo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Petra Auer, Petra.Auer@unibz.it