Supporting migrant origin students to achieve academic success: a critical grounded theory in Italian middle school

To ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all was one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015. However, the recent global increase in refugees and the complex needs of “post-migrants” (Zoletto, 2012) are profoundly challenging the official inclusion policies of European societies (Catarci, Gomes, & Siqueira, 2017). National and international surveys (OECD, 2016) show that the school failure rates of migrant origin students (MOS) are higher than those of their native peers. The data underline the urgent need to unite research, practice, and policy to reduce inequality in education (Suárez-Orozco, Yoshikawa, & Tseng, 2015), assuming a critical social justice perspective (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016) to shape a global citizenship education that promotes an equitable global society (Torres, 2017). My study, set in Northern Italy, attempts to identify an effective model to support the inclusion of MOS, exploring the following research question: How can they best be enabled to achieve academic success? The research is part of a complex mixed-method “Sequential explanatory design” (Creswell, 2013) quant->QUAL, in which I have adopted a critical, constructivist, grounded theory method (Charmaz, 2014). The simultaneous data collection and analysis (2014-2017) involved open and focused observations (82 hours) in 5 middle schools, 28 recorded semi-structured interviews (19 hours) with principals and teachers, questionnaires and document analysis. All the material was transformed into text, transcribed verbatim and encoded using QSRNVivo10: 2,323 occurrences and 847 codes emerged from the open coding. During the focused and theoretical coding, 99 subcategories were built inductively, then grouped into 11 saturated categories (reduced to 7), before being integrated into an interpretative final model. This functional multi-dimensional model involves relational, methodological, organizational, political, economic and ethical dimensions, and identifies an effective 5-step process, that could contribute to the planning of equitable quality education for all.