In my master's thesis, I discuss the topic of ensuring the voice of immigrant children in the process of inclusion in a Slovenian elementary school. I am interested in exploring how the process of inclusion into a certain elementary school in Slovenia takes place, how individual participants are included in the process, what are the results of inclusion and what are the suggestions for improvements. Above all I am interested in how the voice of the individual immigrant student is taken into account at each step of the integration process.
In the theoretical part, I first define the basic concepts of immigration to Slovenia, then I define the legal regulations and approaches to the inclusion of immigrant children, I also define the role and work of the school counseling service and the establishment of relationships with students, and finally I define the importance of advocacy and ways of taking the child's voice into account in the processes of support and help at school.
In the empirical part, I present the results of a qualitative study that I designed as a case study of one elementary school, in which I included individual groups of participants in the process of inclusing immigrant children (school counselors, teachers, immigrant students, parents and external colleagues). I selected the participants using a non-random sample (based on the relevance of the role and availability) and conducted ten interviews with them. The results of the thematic qualitative study show that the process of including immigrant children into Slovenian elementary schools is a demanding process, where all participants - students (immigrants and others) and all employees are challenged. In their work, employees rely on guidelines and guidelines for inclusion, but they largely organize their work themselves, based on their own beliefs, values and experiences, and their relationship with the immigrant child. All participants, including children, show good mutual relations, but they also show many obstacles to effective integration. Among the main obstacles are ignorance of the Slovenian language, insufficient additional hours of help, insufficient mutual cooperation of employees, especially with parents, who are often excluded from the process, as well as difficulties in organizing work and an inadequately designed educational system in general (for example, Guidelines). They also point out some suggestions for more successful integration in the future, such as more cooperation, more concretely defined guidelines, Slovene language education for immigrant children before entering school, as well as a mandatory Slovene language course for their parents. Through the results, the child's voice is shown to be taken into account by all participants, who believe that it has a beneficial effect on the success of immigrant students as well as on good integration among peers.
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