Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems

2004

Author(s): Romhild, Regina | Abstract: The article explores the increasing gap between the cultural dynamics of transnationalization in Germany and the national self-perception of the German society. While concepts of "in-migration" (Zuwanderung) and "integration" still stick to notions of the nation-state as being a "container" embracing and controlling a population and a culture of its own, the various processes of material and imaginary mobility across the national borders contradict and challenge this notion as well as its political implications. By drawing on the transnational life-worlds and the cultural productivity of migrants, anthropological research has made important contributions to render visible this challenge. It is argued, however, that an all too exclusive focus on migration may, in fact, rather conceal the wider effects of transnationalisation and cultural globalisation on the society and its cultural fabric as a whole.

2023

This written conversation took place in the context of several joint projects growing out of a critical movement to address the situation of refugee children in Turkey and Germany, particularly with regard to their right to an education. These projects aim to promote a critical transnational dialogue at the intersection of forced migration and education between civil society education actors, pedagogues and scholars from both countries. The projects include the international exchange project "hep beraber/alle zusammen/all together" (2017-2022, Beril Sönmez and Birte Gooßes, in collaboration with Nil Delahaye) 2 ; the digital conference "Exploring Intersectionality-Building Solidarity across EU-Turkey Borders. Inclusive Education in Times of Forced Migration and COVID 19" (2020, Ellen Kollender and Joanna Krzemińska, in collaboration with

2024

Today is societies, with the advantages of rapid changes and technological developments in transport and communication, are forced to experience globalization even more comprehensively. Especially the areas of attraction created by developed, rich countries attract hundreds of thousands of immigrants who want to achieve better jobs, education and health opportunities. The revenue-sharing disorder in the world has reached incredible heights. In undeveloped countries dominated by conflict, poverty and desperation, millions of people leave their homes and begin a journey of hope. According to the United Nations 2020 data, the international migrant population has reached 271 million people. These people also carry different cultural characteristics to the countries they go to. They are immediately noticed and deceived by the society from which they come with their skin colors and clothes, different languages, social relationships and religious beliefs. At the end of the research it is seen that this negative attitude is maintained, especially in the field of education which allows the new generation of immigrants to adapt and integrate with German society. Given that these people are an indispensable factor of production for the German economy, it is certain that there is no other way than to adopt their different cultures in understanding and tolerance. Conflict and hostility will not only harm incoming foreigners, but also harm Germany and German society. With populist rhetoric, the need for rational policies far from the daily rhetoric of politicians who try to turn people's feelings of hatred and hatred into xenophobia is obvious.

European Educational Research Journal , 2008

Germany has been reluctant to adapt its education systems to the growing number of minority ethnic students, and politicians and policy makers have only recently officially acknowledged that Germany is an immigration country despite decades of mass immigration. This article first provides a socio-historical analysis of the German responses to migration-related cultural and religious diversity by tracing the development of educational policies from assimilationist notions of ‘foreigner pedagogy’ in the 1960s and 1970s to intercultural education, which slowly emerged in schools in the 1980s and 1990s. However, unlike European education, intercultural education still lacks official support in some German federal states. Drawing upon qualitative data collected in two Stuttgart secondary schools, the article then discusses the ways in which schools and students have mediated such macro-level policies. Goethe Gymnasium (a university-track school) promoted European values alongside multicultural values whereas Tannberg Hauptschule (a vocational-track school) was close to being Eurocentric and positioned minority ethnic students as the ‘Other’. The findings suggest that Germany still has some way to go to overcome cultural insensitivities, to increase minority ethnic representation amongst teachers and to promote both diversity and civic cohesion.

Transit, 2011

Academic disciplines develop, reform, and redefine themselves through critical innovations and interventions. Especially in the case of disciplines based in the humanities and social sciences, the impact of historical forces on the political present and future of the very subjects of inquiry-individuals, societies, cultural practices, institutions, and the plethora of aesthetic expressions, including art, architecture, cinema, literature, performative traditions, and more recently, digital and internet-based media-shapes and informs disciplinary practices and agendas. No unique "-ism," no singular practitioner/scholar, no specific "school of thought," no thematically unified bibliography, no singular "turn" (linguistic, cultural, historical, spatial, ethical, material-the list goes on!) indeed no fashionable "trend" ever gains ultimate, absolute, and therefore impenetrable dominance in the life of an academic discipline. The significance of a particular mode of critical thought within a discipline at a given point in history is in fact a manifestation of that specific discipline's dialogue with the historical and political realities in which it exists, which it in turn attempts to understand, analyze, critique, and influence. The existence of an academic discipline, in other words, is a function of its geo-political inhabitance. And in order to pursue such existence, rather than merely to assure it (for better or worse), it is imperative for the practitioners of a discipline to identify hitherto unexamined, under-represented, or under-discussed themes, issues, and texts, and/or to revisit those that have been frequently examined, well discussed and perhaps even over-represented, in order to revamp and reshape the theoretical underpinnings of the modes of inquiry that have been pursued. To be sure, innovation in academic disciplines cannot be identical to the corporate model of "new, improved, and (therefore) better!" In fact, what distinguishes academic/scholarly inquiry in fields such as the humanities and social sciences from other modes of innovation is not so much the ability to constantly generate a new product, a new theory, or a "new light fixture" that sheds the proverbial "new light" on a problem, but the courage to question and critique the perceived "newness" of a mode of inquiry through a constant engagement with the old, the past, the historical in the process of reshaping, redefining, indeed re-determining the new, the present, the contemporary. The essays collected in this Special Topic, "Cosmopolitical and Transnational Interventions in German Studies," attest to the truth of these observations in many ways. As editors, we see it as our role to serve as moderators and facilitators of a multidirectional dialogue (a poly-logue if you will), a collaborative thought process that began at the 49 th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association (Oakland, October 2010). 1 These essays represent a continuation of this conversation. They offer for consideration a set of theoretical approaches and strategies that position "German-speaking nations" (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), as geo-political units and as cultural-linguistic spaces, on the multidirectional itineraries of migration of human beings and ideas, focused on, but not limited to, the labor migration to Germany in the second half of the twentieth century. However, locating a nation or a set of nations on the criss-crossing itineraries of migration can hardly augment the "transnational" or "cosmopolitical" dimensions-to be explained shortly-of interventions if the linguistic qualifier itself is not subject to reasoned scrutiny. Germanistik as a discipline specific to studies of literature and cultures of German-speaking countries was a widely accepted 1 https://www.thegsa.org/conferences/2010/index.asp (accessed May 27, 2011). The interdisciplinary series of panels "Cosmopolitical and Transnational Interventions" consisted of six panels with a total of twenty-two presentations. The panels were organized under the following rubrics:

International Studies in Sociology of Education, 2007

European societies rely on different models to address cultural and religious diversity in education, with different potential consequences for the experiences youth have in schools. Some prefer the term intercultural education emphasising dialogue and interaction while others have historically followed the idea of multicultural education. In recent years, despite the principle of subsidiarity, European institutions have become a key player in education including intercultural education. This article draws on four semi-structured interviews with European Union (EU) education policy-makers to explore the Europeanisation of intercultural education, specifically why and how national educational discourses are shaped by European directives and guidelines. We found that European discourses often run counter to national policies and that EU officials are deeply engaged in promoting intercultural educational philosophies and tackling the educational attainment gaps via the soft-law tool of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The study raises questions about the legitimacy of such EU interventions in national policy domains and assesses the usefulness of a more integrated approach to intercultural education in Europe.

Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2019

The words multicultural and intercultural are not universal signifiers, as Guilherme and Dietz recently stated in this Journal (2015 Vol.10/ 1). This article therefore attempts to be culturally conscious scholarship, and draws a picture of the connotations of these expressions in the recent academic and public/political and discourse in Germany in the mirror of the recent intercultural program developments in German academia. Without attempting to provide a concise analysis of the multi-faceted scholarship and policy papers, the article focuses on the interconnectedness and the discrepancy between the political and the academic discourse. The paper points toward a possible integration of these two areas by suggesting a pedagogical approach that explains intercultural through the arts.

Newcomers to Austria and Germany are obliged to learn German, as both of the nation states define themselves as monolingual – although millions of citizens speak more than one language. The demand to learn the national language is promoted by the shaky promise that it is an entrance ticket to the labour market and also a sine qua non to be respected by German and Austrian citizens. The main research questions of this qualitative study on language courses for migrants and refugees in Germany and Austria are as follows. Which normative knowledge is conveyed to students? How is it conveyed? How do students resist, and sometimes even subvert the (hidden) endeavours of the courses? Through participatory observation, interviews with teachers and a discourse analysis of the state accredited teaching materials, I demonstrate how Eurocentric norms are reproduced and stabilized. The first results highlight the reproduction of mainstream norms and the production of three different interwoven subject types: a) the economic subject who responds appropriately to the needs of a national neoliberal labour market; b) the submissive subject who agrees to norms and rules without the power to fully politically participate; c) the othered subject who forms the pleasing ’constitutive outside‘ of the national body.

History of Education Quarterly, 2006

Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, in The Nation, Europe, and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition, have assembled a group of essays by twelve scholars that reveal how global geopolitical change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is reconciled in educational materials. The editors, who are also contributors, clearly demonstrate how previous productions of knowledge were intimately connected to national objectives; yet such narratives of canonized knowledge are no longer viable in the ongoing process of transnationalization. They stress how these preordained constructions of knowledge were pervasive in school textbooks and that what textbooks teach is always political, ''what a society wishes to convey to the next generations'' (p. 7). As such, school textbooks and curricula are important materials for investigating constructions of the nation. The collection of essays is a welcome addition to the body of literature addressing school textbooks and curricula and national identity and nation construction. The book is organized into three sections. The first section is comprised of four case studies that investigate how the nation-state represents itself in educational materials from France and Germany. One chapter also addresses the Netherlands. As powerful Western European countries, representations of these particular nation-states in relation to Europe are no less complex and contested than nation-states at the margins of Europe. Textbooks and curricula from Greece and Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia, and Spain further complicate European identity as detailed in the four case studies in section two. And, in the last section, contributors provide suggestions for incorporating world history into educational materials and the classroom as well as provide models for reimagining the nation and history. Even though the first section deals primarily with France and Germany, each approach is different and contributes to greater understanding of the complexities of the repositioning of Europe as a transnational entity. Soysal, Bertilotti, and Mannitz, who investigate French and German history and civics textbooks, and Dierkes, who looks specifically at Germany, draw similar conclusions. Germany, dealing with a challenging past, devotes little explicitly to national history, especially what was West Germany, and in comparison with France. Dierkes attributes the difference in transnational trends in both German states to the educational policy makers, which supports similar claims about the construction of national identities in Germany by