Search

This paper reports on a small-scale project involving an online school exchange between two classes of 12-/13-year olds located in the North of England and the Ruhr area of Germany. The overarching aim of the project was to develop intercultural understanding in foreign language learning through communication in an online environment. Analysing data from website posts, lesson observations, student questionnaires and interviews, the paper investigates the extent to which the project realised this goal, and examines emerging practical and pedagogical issues. Comparing the processes and outcomes of this project in secondary education to similar projects in Higher Education (HE), the research found that the young people learnt more than older students about cultural similarities than differences. They were thus less likely to be party to cultural misunderstandings, developing friendly relationships and openness towards a people of a different culture. However, their failure to notice differences may have been due to a lack of in-depth discussion and absence of more demanding student tasks. The paper concludes that in order to develop more sophisticated intercultural learning, expertise derived from telecollaboration in HE needs to be adapted to the lower secondary school context, drawing particularly on auto-ethnography and ethnographic interviewing.

Minority student school dropout represents a challenging issue for educational systems in many countries. Notwithstanding minority families' overall high academic aspirations, there is a stable achievement gap between majority and minority students. Minority students who are emotionally engaged with their school tend to be psychologically and socioculturally better adapted to their country of residence and, as a result, report higher academic success. Therefore, emotional school engagement represents a relevant factor for integration into the host society. The goal of this paper is to investigate the interrelation between ethnic and national identity, perceived discrimination, and perceived support from parents, peers, and teachers with emotional school engagement. Results indicate that cultural capital within the family, cultural self-identification, and perceived support from peers and teachers play an important role for students' emotional school engagement.

This paper deals with the initial findings from an international research project called "Children Crossing Borders." This study focused on discovering how early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems in five countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and the USA) serve the children of recent immigrants and what parents with diverse backgrounds want for their children in ECEC settings. The paper will focus on the issue of multilingualism of immigrant children in ECEC systems in two of the five countries: Germany and France. The questions which guide the paper were: What are the perceptions of the dominant language or nondominant languages among parents and practitioners? How do national contexts affect how the home language(s) is/are used or not used in school settings?

This paper reports on a research study of the long-term effects of a high school home-stay experience for German and American students who participated in the Youth For Understanding program in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. With emphasis on the German sample, this paper (1) briefly describes the study's methodology, (2) provides an overview of major findings, and (3) poses the question: what next? (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

This paper looks at the media in Germany and Australia in order to focus on the question of how Islam is accepted in both countries, and the extent to which Islamophobia exists. It was discovered that, for the most part, the media in both countries present a somewhat biased view of Muslims and Islam. However, there were some significant differences: (1) a higher acceptance of multiculturalism in the Australian media, which is revealed in the greater number of articles on ordinary, everyday multicultural life; (2) differences in the portrayal of migrants' roles; and (3) the terminology used to refer to migrants. The paper concludes by outlining the ways in which multicultural education could contribute to a reduction of Islamophobia. (Contains 1 table and 7 notes.)

The Transatlantic Orientation Exchange/Multiplikatorenschulung im transatlan-tischen Austausch is a collaboration between volunteers and staff in both the US and German AFS organizations. The goal of the project is to increase the level of intercultural learning of German and US secondary education exchange participants and their host families. Germany and the US are among the largest country groups in mutual exchanges within the network: every year around 450 American families host a student from Germany and around 100 German families welcome somebody from the USA. The project was conceived in part as a result of a paradigm shift within AFS in which participants and host family members are now viewed as equal partners in the intercultural learning process. The material presented in this paper was developed in a dialogue process between the work groups in both countries who met virtually and in person multiple times over the course of the project. This construct allowed for group members to engage in a parallel process of intercultural learning and discovery as they identified and applied to their own experience the concepts that would be useful to host families and participants in their respective countries. (Contains 2 figures.)

The three non-profit student exchange organizations AFS, Experiment and YFU, have been running a special assessment center for the development of skills necessary for volunteers working in international student exchange. This paper presents the goals and intentions behind this tool and also discusses the use of human resource development tools in youth exchange. The training of volunteers plays a significant role in all organizations, enabling volunteers to conduct the preparation of participants at a high level. The special assessment center presents a new way of ensuring quality. Participants are enabled to focus on their individual strengths and weaknesses by receiving expert advice during weekend-long training. (Contains 2 notes.)

This paper describes a successful project that promotes the intercultural educational value of international exchange for students and youth groups. "Colored glasses" is a project of the German Youth for Understanding Committee aiming to enhance intercultural education by providing intercultural learning opportunities to students in primary and secondary education. It addresses the questions of (1) how to promote intercultural understanding within a diverse society without necessarily having the experience of going "abroad"; (2) how to approach students from different educational backgrounds and age-groups; (3) how to take into consideration a society that becomes more and more diverse; and (4) what are the adequate teaching/learning methods. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper examines the integration of Turkish labour migrant children in four countries across Europe in terms of their educational performance. By looking at the PISA 2003 (Programme for International Student Assessment) data pertaining to mathematics achievement of 15-year-olds, it explores the effects of ethnicity, gender and family background, on the one hand, and institutional factors (such as kindergarten attendance, grading and tracking), on the other, to offer a better understanding of the large immigrant-native gaps in educational performance. As a result, the author argues that institutional factors can have an impact on school-related integration, in addition to the effects associated with individual factors, thus adding another layer of disadvantage on the children of immigrants. (Contains 5 tables, 6 figures and 9 notes.)

The evolving field of Book History has had difficulty in integrating the experiences of immigrant culture. In explaining the origins of print culture in North America, Book History has a tendency to associate lowbrow with immigrants and their struggles to establish a foothold in a new land. Book History therefore symbolically defines immigrant culture as other, institutionalizing a hierarchy so that highbrow or learned culture is privileged. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Homi Bhabha, this paper suggests that this cultural distinction is not only a contingent classificatory choice that sends a fraught ideological message, but one that should be replaced by the idea of hybridity. (Contains 7 notes.)

The Transatlantic Orientation Exchange/Multiplikatorenschulung im transatlan-tischen Austausch is a collaboration between volunteers and staff in both the US and German AFS organizations. The goal of the project is to increase the level of intercultural learning of German and US secondary education exchange participants and their host families. Germany and the US are among the largest country groups in mutual exchanges within the network: every year around 450 American families host a student from Germany and around 100 German families welcome somebody from the USA. The project was conceived in part as a result of a paradigm shift within AFS in which participants and host family members are now viewed as equal partners in the intercultural learning process. The material presented in this paper was developed in a dialogue process between the work groups in both countries who met virtually and in person multiple times over the course of the project. This construct allowed for group members to engage in a parallel process of intercultural learning and discovery as they identified and applied to their own experience the concepts that would be useful to host families and participants in their respective countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we describe the multiple phases of a teaching project that was constructed around an actual request by a Muslim community in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to establish an Islamic cultural centre. The request provoked a sometimes heated discussion among politicians and citizens that was published in daily newspapers. A large number of the arguments that appeared in the newspapers failed to meet fair argumentation standards and strategies. The teaching project described here therefore aimed to sensitize future teachers to issues of argumentation integrity in dialogues, especially between persons with different religious and ideological convictions. The project was subdivided into three main phases, which treated the topic from different perspectives and with different methods: a simulation game dealing with the request by the Muslim community, a theory-based phase in which participants became acquainted with a construct of argumentation integrity and from this deduced standards and strategies relating to unfair argumentation, and an application phase in which the participants had to examine published arguments by politicians relating to the request by the Muslim community in order to identify rule violations in argumentations. The empirical results suggest that the project promoted insight into unfair argumentation. Such insight can improve interreligious and intercultural communication processes at school. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]