How Do I Get on With my Teacher? Affective Student‐Teacher Relationships and the Religious Match Between Students and Teachers in Islamic Primary Schools

Abstract

Background. Despite the growing body of research concerning affective relationships between teachers and ethnic minority students, very little is known about studentteacher relationship (STR) quality for religious minority students. Many Islamic schools have a mixed workforce consisting of both Muslim and non-Muslim teachers. This means that the quality of religiously congruent and religiously incongruent STRs can be directly compared.Aims. We investigated whether the quality of the STR experienced by Dutch Islamic school students depended on the religious background of their teacher (Muslim vs. non-Muslim). We also examined the role of teachers' implicitly measured attitudes towards Muslims as a possible explanation for differences in relationship quality. Sample. Participants were 707 students (56.9% female) from 35 classes (Grade 3-6) (M age = 10.02 years, SD = 1.25) and their 35 teachers (85.7% female; M age = 32.94 years, SD = 6.37).Methods. Students reported on the quality of the relationship with their teacher (closeness, conflict, and negative expectations), and teachers' implicit attitude towards Muslims (vs. non-Muslims) was measured with an Implicit Association Test.Results. Students reported relatively high levels of closeness and low levels of conflict and negative expectations for both Muslim and non-Muslim teachers. Conflict was slightly higher in religiously incongruent STRs, but only when teachers' implicitly measured attitude towards Muslims (vs. non-Muslims) was included in our model. Conclusion.Results of this study indicate that religious incongruence does not play a major role in STR quality in Islamic primary education.The affective relationships between primary school students and their teachers have been studied with increasing interest in the last decades (Bosman, Roorda, van der Veen, & Koomen, 2018;Howes, Hamilton, & Matheson, 1994;Pianta, 1994), and there is clear evidence that students' emotional and academic adjustment is at risk when theseThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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