Crossroads to More Positive Attitudes Towards Immigrants: Students’ Empathic Abilities and Perceived Classroom Climate

Abstract

As important socialization agents, schools can provide an open climate as a contextual framework for the development of tolerant attitudes (Gniewosz & Noack, 2008). Building positive attitudes towards immigrants can be addressed at the individual and school level. On an individual level, empathy is negatively connected to the development of prejudice (Miklikowska, 2018) and on the school level, classroom climate plays a role (Gniewosz & Noack, 2008). On a class level, exposure to hate speech leads to desensitization and increasing prejudices (Soral, Bilewicz, & Winiewski, 2018) whereas perceived equality and inclusion are positively associated with a sense of school belonging (Schachner, et al, 2018). The teachers are important as well, more specifically, students who perceive teachers as fair, report more tolerant views of immigrants (Gniewosz & Noack, 2008). In the present study we have analysed the associations between students´ attitudes towards immigrants with their empathic abilities, perceived relations with teachers and teachers´ attitudes towards different cultural groups on a sample of 271 Slovenian 8 th grade students (M = 12,91, SD = 0,44; 56,3% female) who participated in the European Erasmus KA3+ Hand in Hand project. We analysed the predictive power of empathy, perceived quality of student-teacher relations and inclusive classroom climate on students' attitudes towards immigrants. Results show that perspective taking and perceived teachers´ attitudes towards different cultural groups are important predictors of students´ attitudes towards immigrants. Results are discussed in light of guidelines for school practice.