490015 SE Seminar on Designing Inclusive Educational Processes (2024W)

Transnational migration has converted many classrooms to social spaces that are constantly reworked through immigrants’ simultaneous identity and belonging to more than one society. These “arenas” are multi-layered and multi-sited, including not just the home and host countries but other sites around the globe that connect migrants to those with whom they share same national, ethnic, linguistic or religious memberships. A classroom with a demographically diverse student population is a space constantly reworked through simultaneous cultural embeddedness of the immigrant students in interaction with their immigrant or non-immigrant teachers and classmates. This course is interested in teachers’ lives in these spaces. The central question oft he course is: What is it like for teachers to work in these spaces of collision, tension, disagreement and rupture? Drawing on the methodology of Researching Lived Experience (van Manen 1997, 2016) we will engage in an empirical and conceptual inquiry of the experience of pedagogical professionalism in transnational educational settings.
The theoretical examination of migration-related diversity is combined with the opportunity to participate in the project “Multilingual Memory of Migration”: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ikw/forschung/gedaechtniskultur-memory-culture/projekte-gedaechtnis/vielsprachiges-gedaechtnis-der-migration. Supported by project manager Georg Traska, students prepare and conduct intergenerational life history interviews. They can actively use their language skills and subsequently interpret the linguistic actions and situations of the interviews as components of migration biographical narratives and reflect on their own position in a post-migrant interaction space. All interviews are archived in the Österreichische Mediathek as the most important national media archive, subtitled in German (if the interview was conducted in a language other than German) and published online with the consent of the participants. The students are thus making a contribution to an “archive of migration” that has not yet been institutionally established in Austria.