Meeting The Educational Needs Of Adopted Children: The Contribute Of The School Climate

Abstract

The adopted children are particularly vulnerable to academic and relational problems due to neglect or past traumatic experiences (Palacios, Román, and Camacho 2010), and the school environment is a fundamental setting where these problems can be addressed or prevented. Recent studies (Novara et al., 2017; Novara et al., 2020) are giving more and more relevance to the role of the school environment in influencing students’ behavior, since children and adolescents spend much of their time at school. A promising strategy consists in promoting those characteristics of the school climate that can foster the teachers’ competence to satisfy the educational and emotional needs of adopted children. In view of these considerations, promoting the creation of a school climate improving teachers’ understanding of the adoption process and the emotional complexities families face would seem to be a particularly important measure to facilitate the children’s adjustment as reported from the research that will be presented. Participants were 573 teachers (95.7% women; mean age = 47.06, SD = 8.66, ranging between 25 and 65) residing in three Italian regions characterized by rates of international adoptions that are higher than the national average. The association between school climate and teachers’ knowledge and competences on adoption was evaluated via independent multiple logistic regression analyses. Findings show that three of the components of school climate under examination are associated to teachers’ knowledge and competences regarding the adoption experience. Thus, interventionsaimedatimprovingschoolclimateholdpromiseforpromotingteachers’capacit tohandlethechallenges of the adoption process (Baker, 2013). The results recommend training programmers for teachers and the recognizing the co-responsibility of the family, school and educational services (Balenzano, 2023). Finally, the CURA Project (PRIN2022 – Children as vulnerable Users of the IoT and AI based technologies: a multilevel and inteRdisciplinary Assessment– 2022KAEWYF)will be presented to explore a first analysis of the risks and potential of the digital environment in the open education.