Acculturation Expectations of Future Female Teachers from Refugee Students: The Role of Empathy and Ethnic Identity

Abstract

Ever since the refugees have travelled through Croatia in
2015, refugee students have begun to enrol in Croatian
schools. Consequently, teachers have been facing various
obstacles in their work, such as teaching pupils from different
cultures, while teacher-training students will encounter the
same obstacles. The aim of this research was to investigate
the predictive power of ethnic identity, general empathy,
ethnocultural empathy, and sociodemographic variables on
university students’ acculturation expectations from refugee
students. Research was conducted at the end of 2019 and
beginning of 2020, on a sample of 128 female university
students, average age of 23, who attended the final two
years of Teacher Training College. The results show that
ethnic identity was positively associated with acculturation
expectations of integration, while ethnocultural empathy was
negatively associated with acculturation expectations of
assimilation.