Table 2.

Illustrative quotations from transcripts.

Themes	Categories	Quotes
Working with students with transcultural backgrounds: coping with unusual situations
Perplexing situations	Experiencing destabilization	(Talking about Chinese sisters): “they are severely um … affected … by something that is, in my opinion, really hard to deal with. For them. Because I've rarely seen that, uh…” (French teacher, 4) “There's a student who's from Kosovo, arrived 5 years ago, [and] who I had last year in Year 10, she was absent a lot for, apparently for depression, so I didn't know more about than that, it's hard to say that she was one of the students, that's all, it was really something a little different.” (French teacher, 27)
	Feeling shock, awkwardness, astonishment	(About a young sub-Saharan girl): “You have this girl, who is basically apathetic. You'll see who can be discomfited! The ‘I don't care' type. When I say impassive, it's impressive. You have the impression that nothing is happening, really, it's the right term.” (School nurse, 6) (Talking about a Kabyle youth): “I had a young man who was failing. He wasn't coming [to school]. We were very shocked. When the parents were able to say, it's the mother who explained, that ‘we can't help him with school'. The mother was illiterate.” (English teacher, 5)
Routines challenged by unusual situations	Standard strategies fail	“It complicates things. And it wasn't only not speaking the language. When you don't understand, yourself, well you don't know, it's hard to say ‘You have to be careful about this.' If the person understands one word out of two, the whole meaning might be distorted. And then, the understanding of the French educational system, its requirements. Finally everything is more complicated, at that point it's much harder to work, it's harder to understand the causes, and as a result, harder to draw conclusions.” (Math Teacher, 1)
	Discriminatory cultural barriers	“There's a parent, I believed he wouldn't speak very well. In fact, he speaks very very well.” (School nurse, 6) “Parents don't express themselves very well in French, so the children are sort of left to themselves. They're in school, but it becomes complicated.” (School nurse, 6) “We've forgotten to say, ‘Why? Why is he not managing to meet our requirements?' For us, it was ‘immature' or ‘he doesn't listen!' And, well, no, there is nonetheless a minority, a numerous minority who don't fit into our explanations.” (English teacher, 5)
Families' school culture is different than that expected by school personnel
Families were seen as inaccessible	Inaccessibility is assumed and explained by the differences in culture and language	“There are cultures—without necessarily being misogynist—it's cultural … People who might be bothered, there, if it were a guy, sometimes, I'm sure that, I think that it could change the situation.” (School nurse, 6)
	Cultural differences remain taboo	“It's hard, [the] single-parent families, it's complicated, because we also have cases of polygamy, anyway, not enormously but um, it's not known it's not said, it's not written, but we know … Because we asked a question, and we didn't understand, and we know that it's polygamy. Single-parent, that doesn't say much.” (School doctor, 13)
Families that do not share the school's mission	Doubting the willingness of parents to agree with the aims of education	“Among the students who I knew they were victims of anxious school refusal, there are sometimes families that are extremely caring, concerned and put time into their children's education, and others sometimes can be a little less so, uh” (History-geography teacher, 11)
	Assuming that families' cultural priorities are incompatible with children's education	“There is, sometimes, a lack of interest in school that can be linked to the family's culture. A child, those they call the travelers, there are a lot of them around here. And the school culture is truly under … underestimated, undervalued. The idea is to be able to work as soon as possible, manual labor, and soon.” (Principal, 41) “The travelers, it depends on the season. There's a semi-chronic absenteeism, in these families. At harvest time, the kids disappeared, they reappeared after. For me, it's cultural. The lifestyle is not compatible with on-going education.” (French teacher, 38) “When you come from a country where school is more a question of luck and an optional right, ok, he goes to school occasionally and there is not so much regular follow-up of lessons. There are some parents who also don't understand, the necessity that the child be there” (Math teacher, 1) “I see families of sub-Saharan origins especially, school isn't more or less important than anything else. They don't see the stakes of school in our civilization, clearly.” (School doctor, 13) “Religion is starting to take a large role in our society. This religion makes people … stand out by the fact of belonging to a group. And so school has no more reason to exist. The older generation, where, on the contrary, the children were super-proud of succeeding, for their parents, and the parents were very proud of their children's success, and of their total integration in the country. You were supposed to be completely integrated, not show your difference. But now, the aim is to show your difference.” (Spanish teacher, 3)
Families complying with school, but lacking resources	The lack of academic skills	“The families don't all have, necessarily, the resources that would enable them to ensure, “success” (in quotation marks), but can nonetheless have an extremely negative view of failure.” (History and geography teacher, 11)
	The lack of implicit social skills	“He started to not come anymore … But really, fear in the belly, you know! We had to telephone them to find out what was going on. They came. The mother explained.” (English teacher, 5)
	The lack of representation of health care services	“Sometimes we have trouble making the parents come in, it's not in their culture, psychiatrists … well there are plenty of civilizations where it's not in the culture … to make them understand that there is care that is necessary.” (School doctor, 13) “Culturally, sometimes, with the Asian population, we have trouble getting them to adhere to care.” (School nurse, 12)
	Unconventional parenting practices involving both physical and moral violence.	“It is striking to observe families from foreign countries, who seem, in relation to school, to be conscious of the importance of the institution, but whose response is a sort of a condemnation that is demonstrated like that, publicly, and that can even take sometimes violent forms.” (History-geography teacher, 11) “It's the parents who had the most trouble expressing themselves in French [who] were the most severe with their children. I had asked them to come in to see me, because his grades weren't good, and then he got slapped in the head. It was a question of honor. The parents feel very guilty each time that there's a report of dropping out. You see it in their attitude, even though it's expressed differently.” (Biology teacher, 42)
	Parental pressure and insensitivity to their child distress	“The parents demanded that it continue to work well. He was coming less and less often to class, and the family demanded that he be at school.” (School nurse, 12) “Chinese … it's silence, they say nothing, [the parents] say nothing, everything is fine … Clams … but no, it'll be ok, they clench their teeth, and then they come.” (School doctor, 13) “Parental pressure is a factor in school phobia. There's greater parental pressure in the Asian community than in the other communities.” (School doctor, 13)
Profiling students without addressing their culture
Talking about the students' culture: a taboo	Teachers' difficulty to refer to culture and migration in their narratives	“I asked one of them where she had been in school, because I didn't dare ask if she was born in France.” (French teacher, 4)
	Using euphemisms and conniving allusions	“You rarely have, uh…'René', most of the time you have ‘Mamadou.' Ok, you see?” (English teacher, 5)
Profiling the students	Worrisome students	(Talking about two Chinese sisters): “They do everything they can to be forgotten and they succeed. They don't move. They don't gesture. They don't catch my eyes. I asked one of them to tell me if, because they are … I said to myself: there, maybe they don't speak French well, they are completely lost.” (French teacher, 4)
	Sly youth	“We have a lot of first-generation immigrants who do not speak French at all. And as a result, no matter how many letters you send them, no matter how many times you call, sometimes you get the student, you don't know, sometimes he fakes it! He picks up and says, “Yes yes I'll tell him.” (Math teacher, 1)
	Highly adapted youth	“We have a lot of foreign students. They invest enormously in school because they understand that it is their only path to salvation. These children [with anxious school refusal] are vulnerable, from an emotional point of view, a little overprotected. Those [immigrant youth], inversely, they are torn from their parents, torn from their family, torn from their friends, and they are super happy to be here.” (Head Guidance Counselor, 19) “They have a power of adaptation, finally … there are two kids who came from Italy, and who came perhaps from Syria before. And so they learned, they already speak French really well, it's incredible! (Educational assistant, 39)
Overcoming cultural barriers
Implementing new strategies for transcultural situations	Providing customized strategies for the youth	“Sometimes we let the students leave, because they have a psychiatry appointment and their parents mustn't know. Because that can put them in danger.” (Head Guidance Counselor, 2)
	Making explicit what is tacit for the other families	“It can be hard to make [Chinese parents] understand that there is treatment that is necessary, so that they want to hear uh … it's complicated for their child … that their child, he's not well.” (School doctor, 13).
Using one's cultural background	To communicate with parents	“I come from another culture too, my family is Iranian. So, I know how to talk to parents who believe that all you have to do is say, ‘listen to your teacher, listen to your teacher.' Because there's no agreement about values, especially in middle school.” (English teacher, 5)
	To set themselves as role model for the youth.	“I'm originally Algerian and there've been students from North Africa and who weren't succeeding. [They said] ‘in any case, I'm stupid, my parents can't read'. So I explained to them, well, my parents couldn't read or write either, but I passed the agreg [advanced civil service test]. I think that also affected them. Anything is possible, and then as a result I set up personalized help for them. [They told me] ‘you give us personalized help, finally someone who listens to us, who considers us.'” (English teacher, 29)
	To connect with the young people affected by anxious school refusal	“There remains, even for these youth, a desire for ‘cultural nourishment.' History and geography are often very important for these youth who have … anxious school refusal … because they always find an association with their past, their culture, their roots.” (Director, 7)