Integration of Immigrant Children in Slovenia: Intensive Slovenian Language Courses for Beginners and Possibilities for Intercultural Dialogue

The revised legislation for primary and secondary schools provides an intensive language courses of Slovenian for beginners and monitoring of an individual’s integration progress. More and more didactic materials are available for children of different ages, but challenges remain. There are even more challenges in implementing intercultural dialogue in the classroom. Curricula and teaching materials should reflect social diversity yet often portray migrants and members of minority groups negatively or do not portray them at all. We must change that and offer them different opportunities to introduce themselves, to talk about the challenges of integration, their hyphenated identity, and their role in society.
Keywords: migrant children, intensive language course of Slovenian, curricula, eurocentrism, life stories

In the twenty-first century, Slovenia is undergoing significant systemic changes in the field of migrant integration. The revised legislation for primary and secondary schools provides an intensive Slovenian language course for beginners and monitoring of an individual‘s integration progress. Both measures significantly go beyond previous project solutions. More and more didactic materials for children of different ages are available. Unfortunately, the new Foreigners Act (2021) makes it more difficult for international students to study at Slovenian universities and for migrant families to reunite. The article presents selected experiences within the project “Only (with) others are we” / “Le z drugimi smo”) (2016–2021), simulating a short Polish language course for teachers and other staff members in kindergartens and primary and secondary schools. The course aimed to put the participants in a similar situation as migrant children entering kindergarten, primary or secondary school. In the reflection session after the course, most participants reported that it was very challenging, even stressful. In the collectives, some participants even refused to participate in the course. This refusal is one of the indicators of the so-called language anxiety that can occur when learning a foreign language. Such anxiety often manifests in the fact that migrant children remain silent for a long time, which is often misunderstood by teachers as a lack of desire to learn the language.
There are more challenges in developing intercultural competence and implementing intercultural dialogue in the classroom. Curricula and teaching materials should reflect social diversity yet often portray migrants and members of minority groups negatively or do not portray them at all. As the researchers noted, curricula and teaching materials are primarily nationally oriented and present only the perspective of the society’s majority; if they even present minorities, they portray them as problematic or from a biased perspective. On the other hand, teachers report that social diversity in the teaching materials encourages them to talk to students about the actual social diversity in their classes. The project “Only (with) others are we” also included lectures by immigrants, emigrants, and members of minorities. Care was taken not to force them to identify only with their (original) ethnicity but to encourage them to talk about the challenges of integration, their hyphenated identity, and their active role in a diverse society to which they contribute with their knowledge and activities.