Due to the longstanding movements of immigrant and refugee families from different countries, ethnic and cultural diversity in schools and classrooms is, in many countries, common and expectedly increasing. Ethnically diverse children, both with and without an immigrant experience, are the foundation of tomorrow’s society. For growingly diverse societies, it is therefore crucial to focus on how the academic and psychosocial adjustment of all children can be supported.

Considering the relevance of social contexts for children’s development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Lerner et al., 2006), this dissertation focuses on school as a place in which children and teachers of various ethnic, cultural and immigrant backgrounds can interact and influence each other. Particularly, aspects such as teaching practices, classroom climate and school relationships can play a crucial role in hindering or promoting children’s adjustment (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2018). Drawing on theories and research on cultural diversity school approaches and attachment and relational models, this work aims to shed light on how culturally responsive teaching, cultural diversity climate and school relationships quality can promote the academic and psychological adjustment of immigrant, refugee and non-immigrant children in Germany.

The introduction chapter provides information on the contextual and theoretical backgrounds of this dissertation. First, I describe the current situation of ethnic and cultural diversity in Europe and Germany, providing an overview on the demographics of immigrant and refugee people in Germany. Second, I delineate the current discourse on migration-related categories and the related issue on terminology in the European context. Third, I introduce the theoretical framework and the main empirical grounds of this dissertation. In particular, I focus on positive youth development (Damon, 2004; Lerner et al., 2005) and resilience (Masten, 2014; Motti-Stefanidi & Masten, 2017) approaches, which stress the importance of examining how children’s adjustment can be promoted and protected from migration-related challenges. I delineate theories explaining how the context may influence children’s development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007; Ford & Lerner, 1992), and specifically account for the role of school in children’s academic and psychological adjustment. Accordingly, I define the specific factors that are related to cultural diversity in school, namely culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2018), classroom cultural diversity climate (Schachner et al., 2016) and school relationships, explaining how these are related to each other and can increase children’s positive adjustment and resilience. Specifically, I aim to address the following questions in three empirical studies: What role do culturally responsive teaching practices and cultural diversity classroom climate play in children’s adjustment? How is the quality of school relationships for children in culturally diverse classrooms, and especially for immigrant and refugee students? Can school relationships promote children’s adjustment despite risks and challenges? Therefore, I outline the main research gaps and aims that the dissertation addresses, and describe the research project, which this dissertation stems from.

The following chapter presents the first empirical study (Study 1), which focused on how teachers’ culturally responsive teaching is related to children’s academic and psychological adjustment. Additionally, I explored to what extent children-perceived cultural diversity classroom climate might mediate this association, and whether these effects differed between children with and without own immigrant experience. The next chapter introduces a multi-informant study (Study 2), in which I examined teacher-student relationship quality, tackling different aspects of this relationship from the perspectives of both students and their teachers. Building on Study 1, here I investigated to what extent teacher-student relationship could explain the association between culturally responsive teaching and children’s adjustment. Next, Study 3 expands the previous study considering not only how teacher-student but also how peer relationship quality is related to children’s adjustment. In particular, in this study I explored to what extent both relationships could protect children’s adjustment in the face of the developmental-acculturative challenge of learning the school language.

The discussion chapter offers a summary of the main results of the three empirical studies in view of the research aims. Moreover, this chapter provides a discussion of the main strengths and limitations as well as implications for future theory building, research and practice. Taken together, findings of this dissertation can help schools, teachers and policy makers targeting interventions that aim at enhancing the academic and psychological adjustment of immigrant, refugee and non-immigrant children in Germany.