Eight graders’ attitudes towards migration topics in Slovenia and Europe – data from IEA's ICCS 2009, 2016 and 2022

Different events in human history have led to moving large masses of people geographically. In more recent times, migration of people is often result of political events and wars – e.g. the “Arab spring”, wars in the Middle East and, finally, the war in Ukraine – have caused migration waves across the world. Europe has been largely affected by the migrant and refugee crisis in 2015 from the Middle East caused by the civil war in Syria and the rise of ISIS. In such large-scale movement of migrants and refugees across countries and continents the hosting and the coming cultures can often face tension, public anxiety, insecurity, stress and turmoil. The discordant political decisions at different levels (national and European Union), the role of media and immediate environment can affect the attitudes of the hosting countries towards the migrants and, consequently, rising negative, and even hostile, attitudes towards migrants and empowering right-wing political formation. Movement of people from outside, and even inside, of Europe has considerable political, cultural, social, economic, but also increasingly educational, impact. While many opinion polls and a lot of scientific research on attitudes towards migrants has been done with adult population in many European countries, none have been conducted among youth (school age population) who are the upcoming active citizens and whose attitudes can be easily influenced by various sources of information. The main purpose of this project is to investigate the trends in attitudes of 8th graders (lower secondary students) in Slovenia and Europe towards migration topics, and factors that influence them. The project will utilize high quality and internationally comparable survey data from three cycles of International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) that are comparable across countries and across time. This project is motivated by the need to understand what the demographic changes, the rise of the radical right and the economic recession mean for pro- or anti-migrant attitudes. Understanding students' attitudes is important for planning future education, as well as for predicting what our society will look like in the future. ICCS cycles are conducted before (ICCS 2009), during (ICCS 2016) and after (ICCS 2022) the migration crisis in Europe which started in 2015. This provides the opportunity to track the trends in student attitudes towards migrants and how they were changing according the changing situation with migration in Europe. Although the target population consists of youth (8th graders) who are not active citizens yet, previous studies have found that that the majority of school students behave as they anticipated later in their lives. The objectives of this project include analysis of the trends in attitudes towards migration, explanation of the complexity in their association with civic knowledge and student background characteristics, improving the understanding of the factors (family, school, and out-of-school) associated with the attitudes towards migrants, review of the curricular documentation on civic and citizenship education in Slovenia, and analysis of data related with teaching in multicultural environment in schools. The quantitative analyses will be with focus on Slovenia, with comparisons to other European countries participating in ICCS’ cycles. The findings from this project will be important and significant because student attitudes towards migration and their potential changes in the last 13 years (between 2009 and 2016 and 2022) will give the first comprehensive overview of the trends in the 8th graders’ attitudes in Slovenia. This can be useful for additional, further research in this area, as well as for curricular changes, including specific syllabuses in the field of humanities and social sciences for compulsory education level.