Shaping the transition to primary school within the family

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dominik Krinninger
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 258197440

Major aim of this research project is to analyze the changes that will appear within a family during their first child's transition to primary school. Focus is put on the interplay of familial practices and the familial environment in its materiality during the process of transformation of the family as a field of experience. In particular, this ethnographic study will be dedicated to practices of interaction and communication within the family as well as the rooms of the family's home including the objects arranged and used within under the aspect of finding out which new topics, ways of practical behavior and objects will appear when their child enters in the transitional phase to primary school, and how the family reacts to this new experience. The specific significance of the family during this process of inter-institutional transition and the feed-back of the order within the family on this process will be made evident by combining focused and non-focused research methods. For this purpose, the familial practices and their materiality are analyzed as a part of the family's every day life as well as under the aspect of their effect on the family as a cultural environment. This basic approach combines various empirical and theoretical research interests: On one hand, a systematic inventory of how the family organizes its environment will be developed as an educational form of action, and the dimension of the materiality of education within the family will be conceptualized. On the other, the reconstruction of the family's influential role during their child's transitional process to school plays an important part in describing how children respond to social demands within their families. For this purpose empirical findings on how school and family matters intermingle within the family are to be generated in order to provide sound information on specific educational potentials that arise on basis of the differences and similarities between school and family. Finally, these empirical findings will also serve for identifying educational relevant forms in which the family - as a community of generations living together - acts in a reflexive manner.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants