Move 1: Establish A Territory

As a consequence of new non-European immigration from the 1960s until today, schools and classrooms in Western Europe, as in the United States, have become increasingly multicultural. From the late 1980s onward, when the second generation started their school careers, many European schools were for the first time confronted with an increasingly ethnically (i.e., racially, culturally, and linguistically) diverse student population. In the European context, we use the term migrant or minority youth to refer to the children of first-generation ethnic minorities, who may or may not have the nationality of the host country. Predominant postcolonial and guest worker types of immigration in Europe occupy an intermediate position in between upwardly mobile voluntary immigrants and permanently excluded involuntary immigrants in the U.S. context of race relations (Ogbu, 1992). More often than not, the minority status of ethnic minority families in European host countries is associated with social disadvantage. This is especially true for children of so-called labor immigrants including, among others, Turkish and Moroccan youth in Europe (Vermeulen and Perlmann, 2000). Most often, their parents have a rural background with little or no formal education; they are vastly overrepresented in low-end jobs; and they are more often unemployed and living in relatively poor urban neighborhoods. As visible minorities, they are also facing widespread ethnic discrimination and prejudice by their European hosts (Bovenkerk et al., 1991).

Clearly, immigration has become a salient and a permanent feature of the school environment in European and North American cities. The ensuing changes in the social and ethnic composition of student populations have far-reaching implications for educational psychology. Learning and teaching in multicultural classrooms pose a major challenge to both students and teachers. Teachers are facing the difficult task of providing an optimal learning environment to students from varying social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. From their side, minority students may have different experiences in the same classroom than their native classmates. For instance, they may have difficulty in understanding teacher instructions and in structuring school tasks, and hence use less effective learning strategies (Tharp, 1989). Not only task aspects but also relational and cultural aspects of the classroom environment come into play. For example, negative teacher stereotypes of minority students as lazy or dumb may become self-fulfilling prophecies (Steele and Aronson, 1995). Furthermore, repeated experiences of school failure may threaten the self-esteem of disadvantaged minority youth, leading to disengagement with learning (Okagaki et al., 1996). Some minority students may lack social or cultural skills to participate actively in classroom interactions (Connell et al., 1994). Others may actively resist schoolwork as a reaction against perceived ethnic discrimination by teachers or peers (Ogbu and Simons, 1998).

In view of the many social, cultural, and academic obstacles that minority students encounter, the question of which motivational factors may support minority students' school achievement is a crucial one. This review focuses specifically on the motivational force of future goals in multicultural classrooms, bringing together motivational research in the United States and Europe. It is argued that the future is both highly relevant and of prime importance for school achievement in general, and for the achievement of minority students in particular. In the first part of this review, we discuss mixed evidence on the motivational role of the future in sustaining minority students' school engagement and achievement. Specifically, frequent findings of "resistance to schooling," in spite of future expectations, cast doubt on the motivational force of the future in minority students' school careers. Typically, school failure is attributed to a lack of congruence between home and school cultures, or else to limited opportunities for disadvantaged minority youth. The second part builds on recent developments in motivational research on future time perspective and goal theory, with a view to developing a more fine-grained motivational theory of future goals. It is argued that future goals may fail to motivate school achievement for two main reasons: Because students may not perceive a clear positive connection between doing well in school and success later in life; and because they may not experience future goals as internally driven or self-set goals but rather as externally controlled or imposed from the outside. Extending recent motivational research to minority students' school achievement, we conclude that future goals will motivate achievement in multicultural classrooms, if schools and families succeed in fostering internal regulation along with positive perceptions of instrumentality.?