Abstract

The quality of education of Ethnic Minorities: Challenge for Teacher education

Urve Aja, Narva College of Tartu University, Estonia
Katri Raik, Narva College of Tartu University, Estonia

During the last decade the EU has underlined in its documents multiculturalism and multilingualism. These attitudes and approaches are valued also in the recommendation given to teacher education (look: Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament. Improving the Quality of Teacher Education, 2007). However, that kind of approach as well as official policy of the state do not necessarily reach neither to the teacher education nor to daily work routine of schools. PISA studies have confirmed that despite of some positive tendencies the learning outcomes of pupils from ethnical minorities are lower than the ones from majority nation.
Nowadays the teacher education has several challenges. As a fact,  in the EU ethnic minorities study in the education system  where the language of instruction is the state language, therefore all teachers should, as minimum, be competent in methods of content and  language integrated learning, value individual approach to learners, formative assessment, - which means being ready to work in multicultural classroom. Important are attitudes and values of the teacher, first of all, tolerance and cultural knowledge, language skills. This leads to the necessity of specifying these competences in the professional standard of teachers.
The quality of education can be achieved not only through degree programs. There has to be a support program for a teacher: in-service training and consultations (methodical as well as psychological) do support a teacher working in multicultural environment. Additional competences for teachers working in ethnic minority schools have to be worked out. It refers to knowledge, skills, values, as well as language, culture and methodology. In this paper we introduce the experience Estonia has gotten during the last 20 years
In this paper we analyze what, how and why has to be taken into consideration in order to improve quality of education. We make a stress on the need of reflecting new teacher competences in the state regulations.