Tübingen School of Education (TüSE)

Migration and Refugees

The section “Migration and Refugees” investigates how migration and refugees are institutionally treated in the school system. Research projects are based on the assumption that both school organization and classroom educational practices specifically constitute the societal phenomenal domain of migration and refugees. The main focus is on the research question — what practical relevance socio-cultural and socio-economic ascriptions have in the context of learning and performance-related differentiation in the classroom, and how these ascriptions govern the differential access to unequal educational opportunities. 

Research Projects

Refugees and Migration as a prominent issue of community education policy and practice.

Cooperation Project: Prof. Dr. Marcus Emmerich, University of Tübingen / Prof. Dr. Ulrike Hormel, PH Ludwigsburg

The most recent wave of forced migration from areas of conflict and war, as well as migration caused by the increased restrictions of freedom of movement within the EU in Bulgaria and Romania, have become a matter of discussion not only in the context of migration policy, but social and educational policy as well. Due to the fact that the current movement of refugees contains many school-age children, communities (cities, districts) have been forced to not only develop strategies of migration policy (key word: integration), but also to organize the schooling of the newly-migrated students on a local level. The issue is more drastic than communities simply developing and taking their own approaches to this challenge and by doing so – on both a state and national level – creating an institutional variance with how migration is handled; rather, within a fully differentiated and highly-selective school system, newly-migrated students will likely be placed into an inclusion program. 


With this in mind, the research project investigates the question of how organizational structures of local school sytems deal internally with the issue of refugees and „new“ migration, which action strategies are pursued on the community level, and which measures can be practically implemented in educational organizations. 

Focusing on factors in the education sytem which negatively impact school attendance within the immigrant community, the project builds on educational and sociological research on the emergence of social disparity and inequality within the educational system. However, by doing so, the project places a special emphasis on the interplay between community organizations and the local educational system, which will be empirically examined using qualitative analysis.