In the master's thesis we focus on school counselors and their role in the integration of immigrant students in the educational system. In the theoretical part, we first define the key concepts, such as immigrants, migration and integration, which allows us to more easily understand the topic. Then we present the Slovenian immigrant policy view on inclusion of immigrant students in the school system. This is followed by the definition of intercultural pedagogy and its priority areas, such as learning the native language, learning the Slovenian language and the creation of an intercultural curriculum, with the help of which we can achieve intercultural goals in schools. After that we present the school counseling service and its role in the integration of immigrant students. In the last part, we briefly present intercultural competencies and their acquisition in the initial and further education of teachers and school counselors.
In the empirical part, we present the findings of our study in which we conducted three interviews with school counselors. We studied how the integration of immigrant students takes place in the schools where the counselors are employed. That is, how schools formulate an individual plan of activities, how they conduct additional Slovene language classes and how they achieve the goal of intercultural education. We researched how counselors collaborate with teachers, students and parents of immigrant students. We found out how they face different challenges at their work and what they think about the state's support in integrating immigrant students. We were also interested if they feel trained enough for working with immigrant students and if they use self-evaluation at their work.
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