The Research Cluster aims to bring together existing top-level expertise in multilingualism (linguistics, education sciences) at the University of Hamburg and to combine and focus this expertise on the investigation of migration-induced multilingualism as found in urban centers worldwide.
Funded by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg - Landesexzellenzinitiative Hamburg
First period: July, 2009 to December, 2010
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The research project pertaining to "full-day program and integration processes among immigrant children (GIM)? started its first documentation in August 2008. It examines the impact of full-day programs on intercultural relations, political and social skills and second language acquisition of children and adolescents with an immigrant background in the primary and lower secondary education.

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Project coordinator: Prof. Dr. Ingrid Gogolin, University of Hamburg, EERA President
Technical coordinator: Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann, Humboldt University of Berlin
Project Manager Virginia Moukouli, University of Hamburg, Institute for Multicultural and International Comparative Education

Upon instigation of the European Educational Research Association  (EERA, www.eera.eu) and its members, a project entitled European Educational Research Quality Indicators (EERQI) was successfully proposed in the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union.

We are glad to announce that EERQI will be funded as a small collaborative project with Euro 1,494,564. The project will officially begin on 1st April 2008 for a three year period.

Aims of the project:
EERQI will build an advanced prototype framework for relevance assessment of research documents in educational research. This will be based on formal mechanisms including citation analysis and linking, semantically-based full text analysis and co-occurrence of information items in open access and non-open access repositories. Moreover, journal articles, books and other freely-available scholarly publications are included.

Educational research has been chosen as a prototype of socially and politically embedded fields within the humanities and social sciences. The resulting prototype framework of quality indicators and methods will provide the base toolset for a European information service for evaluation of educational research publications and can be applied to other social sciences and humanities fields.

Complementary to traditional measurements of scientific quality (citation analysis, journal impact factor), new methods and indicators of quality assessment will be tested (usage assessments, versions available, other statistical methods, as well as by means of advanced, semantics-based detection of linking, correlations and referral contexts).

The project will also address the complex role of the diversity of scientific languages in Europe. Different languages can be a barrier to the international flow of communication. They are at the same time fundamental to expressing complex scientific ideas which are embedded in a certain historical and cultural back-ground. Thus the project will also address the challenge of effectively dealing with multilingualism and specific "cultural heritage" of research traditions in the European countries.

EERQI results will raise visibility and competitiveness of European researchers and contribute to new policy bases for funding, hiring, and evaluation decisions in European academic and research institutions.

The Project will be carried out by a Consortium of 19 Institutions including
- European international and national learned societies in educational research,
- departments of education at European universities,
- computer and documentation centers in different European countries,
- European publishers of educational research.

Read more: www.eerqi.eu

How do young users or non-users of urban places of religious worship regard the importance of religion or secularism? How do they regard the relationship of their place of worship towards the community? These are the questions the project The Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission is concerned with. Therefore it focuses on three main topics: urban religious places and local forms of religious representation, young people´s "standpoints" and changes in social relations. The project is based on the assumption that young people are key indicators of whether or not religion is re-emerging as a social force in Europe.

The project will use qualitative research methods such as audiovisual documentation, interviews with young people or clerics and focus groups.

Three research teams will work in the European cities of Hamburg, London and Oslo, making it a truly international comparative research project.

Duration: April 2007 to November 2008
Project website: NORFACE
Funding: NORFACE

Model Program "Förderung von Kindern und Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund" FÖRMIG  (Support for Immigrant Minority Children and Youth)

Scientific advisor and spokeswoman

The launch of the five-year model programme "Förderung von Kindern und Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund FÖRMIG" (Support for Immigrant Minority Children and Youth) was on 1st September 2004. The aim of the programme is to offer children and youths from immigrant families better language support in order to increase their chances for success in German schools. The Institut für International und Interkulturell Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft der Universität Hamburg (Institute for International and Intercultural Comparative Education) has taken on the scientific monitoring as the body responsible for the programme.

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Conference 2009 >>>

Learning Math in the Context of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity 

Directors: Ingrid Gogolin, Gabriele Kaiser; in cooperation with Hans-Joachim Roth

Cultural and language diversity in the student body - as a result of migration - is a significant context factor in math and science education. However, this circumstance presumably currently remains largely unnoticed or underestimated, as does the significance of emotions, beliefs and motivation for learning. The aim of the project is to help determine whether linguistically and culturally different modes of perception and concepts of math and math education can be identified between students from immigrant minority families and non-immigrant families. This includes studying the specific living conditions (the migration history of the families as well as other contextual conditions, e.g. the notion of and expectations from education, the support offered by the family).
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Postgraduate Lecture Programme "Research of Educational Backgrounds"

The postgraduate lecture programme "Research of Educational Backgrounds" has existed since October 1st 2002 in the School of Education, Psychology and Human Movement of the Hamburg University. It studies the question of how children and adolescents and young adults behave in the teacher-student situation, how they interpret their study assignments and what can be done to support their learning processes. The first funding period ended on August 30th, 2005: in a second phase the postgraduate lecture programme will be funded until March 31st, 2007.

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Directors: Sara Fürstenau, Ingrid Gogolin

On the occasion of the "European Year of Languages 2001" the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam) initiated the "Multilingual Cities Project" in cooperation with the "Babylon" research group of Tilburg University, which the Research Centre for Multicultural Education participated in. It is an international comparative study which includes the cities of Madrid, Lyon, Brussels and Hamburg. The topic of the study is a home language survey: the languages primary school children speak in their families apart from German were surveyed. Funding: the Hamburg School Authority and the European Cultural Foundation.

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Scientific Advisor of the School Experiment "Bilinguale Grundschule" (Bilingual Elementary Schools) in Hamburg

Directors: Ingrid Gogolin, Ursula Neumann, Hans-Joachim Roth

Traditionally, immigrant children in Germany mostly have classes only in German. Apart from that - depending on the Land (Federal state) - they may receive some lessons in a selection of languages spoken in immigrant families; these are called "language of origin lessons" or "mother tongue lessons". This keeps the living languages of immigrant children ? German and the language otherwise spoken in the family - separate from one another, although they belong together in the "lifeworld" experience of the children. "Bilingual Elementary Schools" should take into consideration these living conditions in a culturally and linguistically diverse world: two languages are the object and medium of learning at the same time. Funding: School Authority Hamburg.
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Scientific Advisor of the School Experiment "Sorbisch-deutsche bilinguale Schulen" (Sorbian-German bilingual Schools) in Saxony

Directors: Ingrid Gogolin, Hans-Joachim Roth