Globalization, increasing mobility and advanced communication technologies result in new forms of migration in the 21st century, which is creating growing diversity (Teltemann and Windzio, 2016). Such transformations become highly visible in schools as children of different cultures, identities and life stories come together (Fürstenau and Gomolla, 2011). School, in addition to their educational mission, also has an upbringing mission and can be considered a central place of social learning (UNESCO, 2006). Therefore, school nowadays not only is a context of socialization but also the most central context of acculturation for immigrant and minority children (Berry et al., 2011). Taking the perspective of cultural transmission (Schönpflug, 2001), the school can be viewed as a miniature society that children need to adapt to (Berry, 2015) – the school with its organisation, structure, norms, and values representing the values and norms of the system of the dominant society (Hummrich and Kramer, 2017). Within such a framework of cultural transmission in educational settings with values being one of its various outcomes (Grusec and Hastings, 2015), teachers can play a powerful role (Hurrelmann, 2006). Teachers transmit the values they find important, both explicitly and implicitly through their actions in school (Schubarth, 2019) – representing one side of both the bi-directionality of value transmission and the bi-dimensionality of acculturation (Knafo and Galansky, 2008; Berry, 2015). Further, across countries, teachers are commonly members of the majority-group (i.e., European-wide data show that only a small percentage of the teaching staff belongs to ethnic minority groups; Donlevy et al., 2016). Consequently, they can be considered as part of the hosting society sharing different orientations towards the minority group, that is, different acculturation attitudes.

Therefore, it seems highly promising to investigate the construct of acculturation within the school context and combine this with studying value transmission. The present study is aiming at achieving this, presenting data from the multicultural and multilingual region of Bolzano in Northern Italy. The Autonomous Province of Bolzano borders Austria and Switzerland and is characterised by the cohabitation of three language groups – German, Italian and Ladin – and is thereby home to German and Ladin minorities, when taking the broad perspective on the Italian state. From a closer view of the autonomous province, instead, the Italian and Ladin language groups are the minorities (Voltmer et al., 2007; Baur, 2013). Moreover, besides these, other minorities must be considered today, namely, those caused by the new forms of migration in the 21st century (e.g., globalization, increasing mobility, advanced communication technologies; Teltemann and Windzio, 2016). Recently, several authors (Wisthaler, 2013; Zinn, 2017, 2018; Carlà, 2019), foremost Medda-Windischer (2015, 2018), shed light on the reality in the province through the arrival and presence of these “new minorities.” Researching the interplay of value transmission and teachers’ acculturation orientations in this school context promises particularly interesting insights.

Even though, since its inception, the construct of values has assumed a central role in various research disciplines, there has long been a lack of a consensus definition (Schwartz, 2012). It was at the beginning of the 1990ies that the sociopsychologist and cross-cultural researcher Shalom Schwartz starting from all prior definitions of and works on values elaborated a theory of basic human values, which to date is the most cited and agreed upon. Schwartz (1992, 1994) defined values as broad life goals that serve as guiding principles in a person’s life. As such, values are relatively stable across situations and across time. Schwartz and collaborators (reviewed in Sagiv et al., 2017) established that personal values can be organised in a circular structure (Figure 1). In this structure, single values are subsumed under the heading of either of ten value types: Universalism, Benevolence, Tradition, Conformity, Security, Power, Achievement, Hedonism, Stimulation, and Self-Direction. These value types are arranged alongside a circular continuum, wherein neighbouring values have a similar motivational goal, whereas opposing values have conflicting motivational goals. For example, values of universalism and benevolence share their motivation to support and help others and are compatible in this respect. But the pursuit of these so-called ‘self-transcendence values’ potentially conflicts with the pursuit of the opposed ‘self-enhancement values’ (power and achievement) as these are targeted at obtaining prestige, control, and success for oneself. Besides these two opposing poles of self-transcendence versus self-enhancement, the model presents a second dimension, which is composed of the poles ‘Openness to Change’ (self-direction, stimulation, and sometimes hedonism values, therefore the dotted line in Figure 1) versus ‘Conservation’ (tradition, conformity, and security values). Due to this structure, variables that relate positively to one value tend to also relate positively to neighbouring values and to relate negatively to conflicting values. Hence, this structure shows why, for example, it may be difficult to encourage children to be the best in the class (self-enhancement) but also be kind to one another (self-transcendence), as this can induce conflict. However, it is possible to encourage children to be kind to one another while also mastering challenges of learning and understanding (openness to change values).

Alongside the theoretical work defining the concept, Schwartz’s theory provides also reliable instruments to measure values in adults (Schwartz, 2012) and children (Döring et al., 2010). The latter consists in a developmental-appropriate technique based on pictures, which make it possible to talk about the abstract construct of values on the level of concrete operations (Piaget, 2003). Even though children in middle childhood can draw logical conclusions about concrete objects and events, they might still find it difficult to think in purely abstract terms (Siegler et al., 2016). To date, several studies (e.g., Döring, 2010; Bilsky et al., 2013, 2015; Cieciuch et al., 2013; Collins et al., 2017; Abramson et al., 2018) confirmed the existence of value structure as postulated by Schwartz in children from the age of 5 years what shows that even at such an early age, children can differentiate values comparable to adults. Consequently, Schwartz’s work builds a sound starting point for venturing a step into new directions of acculturation research - the central theme of this research topic - through the combination of value transmission in the school context and teachers’ acculturation orientations.

As defined by Berry (1990) psychological acculturation can be defined as “[…] the process by which individuals change, both by being influenced by contact with another culture and by being participants in the general acculturative changes underway in their own culture” (p. 235). Formulated more generally, acculturation can be understood as one feature of the process of cultural transmission, whereby the individual undergoes this process by being in contact with a culture other than their native culture (Berry, 2015). As becomes clear from the definition, he proposes a bidimensional model of acculturation considering both, aspects of heritage and host society culture as independent dimensions. The first dimension is related to the question if it is valuable to maintain the heritage culture, whereas the second asks about the value of adapting to the host society (Berry, 1990). Depending on how both questions are answered (i.e., through agreement or disagreement) four acculturation strategies emerge: integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization, which in later works has been differentiated into exclusion and individualism. Starting from this model, Bourhis and Bougie (1998) developed their Interactive Acculturation Model (IAM) by going a step further and considering not only the immigrant’s acculturation orientations but also the host community’s acculturation orientations. Concretely, two dimensions from the perspective of the latter and with those two more questions are added to Berry’s (1990) model: the first asking whether it is acceptable that immigrants maintain their heritage culture, the second whether an adaptation to the host culture is accepted. As can be seen in Figure 2, the combination of these results in different relational outcomes between the two groups definable as consensual, problematic, or even conflicting (Bourhis et al., 1997). As concerns the acculturation orientation of the host community, within a revision of the model, integration has been subdivided into two distinct forms leading to the following six orientations (Montreuil et al., 2004): Integration shows up in the simultaneous acceptance and valorization of both the maintenance of the heritage culture and the adaption to the host community culture. Instead, integration-transformation means being willing to transform some aspects of the latter culture to benefit the integration of immigrants. On the contrary, assimilation implies that immigrants should adapt to the host culture whereas segregation consists of the acceptance that immigrants maintain their heritage culture as long as this does happen in separation and does not impact the host culture. Instead, exclusion becomes visible in the intolerance of both immigrants who maintain their heritage culture and those who adapt to the host culture (i.e., denial of being or becoming members of the host society at all). Lastly, individualism can be seen as rejecting a differentiation between the two cultures as discussed so far and consists in seeing and valuing a person as an individual instead of as a member of a specific group.

In the school context teachers play a crucial role in ethnic minority students’ acculturation, as they can facilitate or hinder students’ acculturation and hence affect their psychological adjustment (Makarova et al., 2019). Previous research has shown that experience of assimilative pressure in school can lead to acculturative stress and maladaptive adjustment outcomes among minority students (Makarova et al., 2019). An experience of assimilative pressure can be increased through lack of support for bicultural development and/or marginalization of students’ cultural resources at school and insufficient implementation of multicultural policies (Makarova and Birman, 2016). Hence, teachers who embrace an integration-transformation orientation can facilitate bicultural students’ development in multicultural educational settings, whereas teachers with exclusionist orientation can hinder development of sense of school belonging among students of different cultural origins. Finally, especially the match between students’ acculturation attitudes with teachers’ acculturation preferences can decisively affect the adjustment outcomes in the school context (Haenni Hoti et al., 2019). The present study therefore focuses on integration-transformation versus exclusion as the key dimensions of acculturation orientations.

Starting from these theoretical underpinnings and in line with the overarching aim of this article selection to provide new insights into the field of acculturation research in educational settings, the rationale for the present study is to find out more about a possible moderating effect of teachers’ acculturation orientations on teacher-pupil value transmission in primary schools, exploring whether teachers’ acculturation orientations of integration-transformation strengthen and teachers’ acculturation orientations of exclusion weaken teacher = pupil value transmission. Researching values in the classroom, including data on children’s values (level 1) and their class teacher’s values and acculturation orientations (level 2) this multilevel study is led by the following research question(s):

The present article provides insights into a study investigating the concept of acculturation (Berry, 2015) in the school context through the connection with the concept of personal values (Schwartz, 1992, 1994) by researching the interplay of teachers’ acculturation orientations and value transmission. Overall, referring to the first research question, it was found that teachers’ conservation values significantly predicted their pupils’ conservation values, and that teachers’ openness to change values significantly predicted their pupils’ openness to change values, what can be interpreted as a successful value transmission. Further, teachers’ acculturation orientations were significantly related to their values. However, none of the acculturation orientations showed acting as a moderator in the prediction of pupils’ values. Thus, the second research question needs to be negated.

The evidence of similarity of values between teachers and pupils for conservation and openness to change values as shown in the significant correlations and by the predicting role of teachers’ values on pupils’ values might be a first key finding of the present investigation since only very few studies have actually investigated teacher-child value similarities. In line with the study by Knafo and Schwartz (2004, 2012) on parent–child value congruence, it can be interpreted as the result of a successful value transmission from teachers to pupils but may also be the result of a successful transmission in the opposite direction from pupils to teachers (Knafo and Galansky, 2008). Against the backdrop of cultural transmission (Schönpflug, 2001) and the understanding of values as being one of its various outcomes (Grusec and Hastings, 2015), the present study was able to show that teachers play a key role in value transmission and consequently also in acculturation processes in the school context. Since teachers transmit their values, both explicitly and implicitly, in school (Schubarth, 2019), teachers might acknowledge the importance of their personal values in order to be more aware about what is important to them and how they impact their students’ values. However, future research should investigate also the opposite direction, namely if and how teachers’ values are predicted by their pupils’ values. Unfortunately, the design of the present study did not allow to have insights in this second pathway of values transmission (Knafo and Galansky, 2008).

Since the present study was the first to investigate the relationship between teachers’ integrationist and exclusionist acculturation orientations and their values in the school context, it contributes to the research topic of acculturation and education by providing a possible new pathway of conceptual and methodological approaches in acculturation research. Therefore, the correlations between these two concepts can be considered a further crucial result. More precisely, integration-transformation showed a significant correlation with openness to change and a significant negative one with conservation. This indicates that teachers who agree with integration-transformation (i.e., willing to transform some aspects of the own culture to benefit the integration of minorities) attribute higher importance to openness to change (i.e., independent thinking and action and the preference for change), but less importance to conservation values (i.e., obedient self-restraint, preservation of security and traditions). Instead, exclusion (i.e., total denial of minorities, be it minorities who maintain their heritage culture, be it those who adapt to the host culture) shows significant positive correlations with conservation and self-enhancement (i.e., striving for one’s own success and dominance over others) and a negative one with self-transcendence (i.e., acceptance of others as equal individuals and benevolence towards others) revealing that teacher’s agreement with exclusion is related to more importance attributed to conservation and self-enhancement, but less to self-transcendence. Consequently, the two acculturation orientations are not only related to specific values, but also mirror the circular motivational structure of the theoretical model (Schwartz, 1992, 1994) as it was shown in prior studies for behavior (e.g., Bardi and Schwartz, 2003; Schwartz, 2010). This leads to the fact that the relationship between behavior and values always needs to be seen as a relationship with the whole set of the ten basic human values, because even those values not showing any relationship with a particular behavior are still important for its interpretation and understanding (Sagiv and Roccas, 2017). For example, Schwartz (2010) was able to show that accepting immigrants not only correlates most positively with universalism, but also most negatively with the opposed value type security. Moreover, the correlations strictly followed the circular value structure, that is, starting from universalism and following the circle in both directions to security where the correlations decrease and become negative. Therefore, it seems promising and important to study acculturation orientations in combination with or through values and value transmission, since the latter can be defined as underlying attitudes or orientations (Schwartz, 2012). As the present study could show, the two opposing acculturation orientations are related to opposed values, what leads to the hypothesis that this in part also explains why the combination of these two results in a problematic relational outcome within the Interactive Acculturation Model (Bourhis et al., 1997; see Figure 2). Further studies involving both, teachers and student’s acculturation orientations, are needed to draw a clear empirical evidence.

Teachers’ acculturation orientations are not related to their pupils’ values in this study, neither as direct predictors nor as moderators. Hence, it can be deduced that teachers’ values are the stronger and more relevant predictors for children’s values than teachers’ acculturation orientations. In a similar vein, Barni et al. (2018) showed that teachers’ values and the values teachers want their students to endorse determined their teaching styles. Teachers rating self-transcendence and openness to change higher and self-enhancement lower adopted an authoritative style, which has been shown to be the most beneficial for students (Buskist and Benassi, 2012). The authors (Barni et al., 2018) conclude that authoritative teachers are guided by putting their focus on their students (i.e., “other-oriented style”) instead of on themselves. The findings of the present study would sustain such an interpretation and can add that teachers who are oriented more towards the others also hold the more beneficial acculturation orientation (Makarova et al., 2019). Taken together, the findings may further lead to the conclusion that investigating teachers’ values and their relationship with other attitudes and orientations tied to teachers acting as professionals seems to be an important and promising field, not only for research but also for teacher education. Even though values are defined to be relatively stable over time (Rokeach, 1973), it was shown that one’s values can change (Bardi and Goodwin, 2011; Sagiv and Roccas, 2017). Further, there exists empirical evidence, that individuals adapt their values to different contexts, resulting in a change of the importance of specific values in that situation (Daniel et al., 2012) and that if norms strictly tell us how to behave in a certain situation, internal factors become less influencing (Roccas and Sagiv, 2010, p. 34). Hence, raising the awareness of values as principles guiding human action can be considered an important aspect for the professionalization of teachers. For example, through a framework of inclusive values building the starting point for the development of more inclusive schools (Booth and Ainscow, 2017), which would also sustain and positively affect the acculturation of minority students (Makarova and Birman, 2016; Makarova et al., 2019). Although the present study provides important first findings on the relationship between acculturation and value transmission in the school context, it has some limitations which need to be enclosed. First, the nature of cross-sectional data (i.e., dependent and independent variables are measured once and at the same timepoint) leads to the limitation that the temporal cannot be determined. Longitudinal data would provide more detailed insights in value transmission, because only by continuously recording values and acculturation orientations lines of development can be traced. Further, within the multicultural situation of the province, such longitudinal study might be designed in a cultural comparative way to examine whether value transmission and the role of acculturation orientations follow a universal course or rather show cultural specificities (Boehnke, 2018). Another limitation of the present study was the fact that only very few variables were included in the model and consequently it was not able to explain the whole variance of classroom-related differences in the importance children attribute to specific values. Similarly, the fact that only one teacher of the teacher team has been selected and that this selection was made randomly leads to the limitation, that not all teachers’ values impact was considered. Future studies should account for the values of all teachers teaching the respective class or at least those teaching it for a certain minimum of hours. In this way the reality of children being confronted with the value hierarchies of their different teachers could be respected. Instead, regarding the concept of acculturation and the multicultural situation of the province consisting of a complex situation of “old” and “new” minorities (Medda-Windischer, 2015, 2018) and difficulties to clearly define who is the minority (Baur, 2013) the theoretical model by Bourhis and Bougie (1998) might not be able to fully account for such realities. However, from this limitation, possibilities and initial ideas for a revision or extension could arise, providing a model and related instruments which respect and fully fit also to more complex multicultural contexts were a distinction between minorities and majority is not always possible. Finally, the study was clearly limited by the fact that only teachers’ acculturation orientations were included but not pupils’ acculturation strategies. To be able to capture acculturation in its entirety as a two-dimensional process (Berry, 2015) including both variables seems to be a necessary desideratum for future research.

To conclude, the study presented in this article as one of the first investigated acculturation in the school context in connection with values transmission seen as one possible outcome of cultural transmission (Schönpflug, 2001). As such it can provide preliminary insights into the extent to which teachers’ values and acculturation orientations predict pupils’ values. It demonstrates the utility of investigating acculturation processes also from the perspective of value transmission in the classroom and, at the same time, through its owns limitations, underlines the necessity to do so in line with the theoretical conception of both, values and acculturation, as bidirectional or bidimensional processes (Knafo and Galansky, 2008; Berry, 2015).

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Research Ethics Committee of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

PA, EM, AD, and HD equally contributed to the design and conceptual idea of the manuscript. PA wrote the whole draft, did the data collection and the statistical analyses. EM wrote parts of the introduction and discussion and revised the manuscript at different timepoints. AD wrote the abstract, different parts in the whole manuscript and took part in the statistical analyses. HD was involved in the original conceptualization of the study, the translation process of the HCAS items and reviewed the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The funding for Open Access was provided by the University Library of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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