Acculturation Expectations of Future Female Teachers from Refugee Students: The Role of Empathy and Ethnic Identity

Abstract

Ever since the refugees have travelled through Croatia in 2015, refugee students have begun to enrol in Croatian schools. Consequently, teachers have been facing various obstacles in their work, such as teaching pupils from different cultures, while teacher-training students will encounter the same obstacles. The aim of this research was to investigate the predictive power of ethnic identity, general empathy, ethnocultural empathy, and sociodemographic variables on university students’ acculturation expectations from refugee students. Research was conducted at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, on a sample of 128 female university students, average age of 23, who attended the final two years of Teacher Training College. The results show that ethnic identity was positively associated with acculturation expectations of integration, while ethnocultural empathy was negatively associated with acculturation expectations of assimilation.