EDUSPACE. School Cultural Space and Migration in Germany and the U.S.A.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Merle Hummrich
• Subject Area: Education Systems and Educational Institutions
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281436693

This application has been submitted in 2013 under the name of Participation, Education and Constructions of Difference. A Cultural Comparative Analysis of Possibility Spaces of Schooling in Germany and the U.S.A..The change of the title, which is now EDUSPACE. School Cultural Space and Migration in Germany and the U.S.A. designates also an adjustment of the projects focus. Though the constructions of students differences still shall be examined in a multi-level international comparative and school cultural analysis, the topic immigration as paradigm of constructing differences is emphasised even more clearly. This topic has only rarely been examined with regards to school cultures and international comparison yet. The project still sticks to the assumption that the U.S.A. and Germany are appropriately contrasting cases, when it comes to contrast different strategies of dealing with the students differences, because of the countries different ways of realising public education; but it specifies in the assumption that this can be understood well with reference to the topic of immigration. The perspective of spatial analysis makes it possible to catch up with the complexity of the studys design, which examines arrangements of order and placement with regards to immigration in the educational system and relates the structural conditions to the classroom interactions an the contained spatial locating performances. The aim is to generate knowledge about contrasting strategies in dealing with immigration and constructing orders of belonging at school. To realise this aim, qualitative data at different levels of social action shall be collected in Pennsylvania, U.S.A, and Germany, Schleswig-Holstein, so that the level of society, region, institution and interaction comes into sight. So the data material includes wording of law, regional and supra-regional regulations, mission statements, Homepages, Interviews with headmasters and teachers and classroom interactions as well. The realisation therefore includes two more specifications, which became possible by the preliminary work between the two applications: firstly, concrete federal states/lands have been chosen, so that secondly there are free capacities for examining the level of interaction, which lets expect active dealing with the spatial possibility structures of society and institutions. Germany and the U.S.A. therefore can be contrasted as two different cases of dealing with immigration and as different possibility spaces of dealing with difference.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. David P. Baker; Professorin Dr. Maryellen Schaub