Deutschlandsberg is a mostly rural county southwest of Graz with several small villages and cities. This political unit has undertaken the task to transform all of its former Secondary Modern Schools into New Middle Schools at the same time while – in contrast to other counties – going through an accompanying coherent, long-term school development process. The project described here is a transfer project of a school development process initiated and developed by the Ministry of Education (2006-2011) called net1.
The two-year research project involves 9 NMS (the school development project will also involve 14 grade/primary schools in total), where two of the team members, Eva Theissl and Sonja Vucsina, work with varying faculty members over the course of all together three years. The overall goal of the school development process is to establish a cooperative and collaborative school climate in which individualized forms of learning can take place. A special role is attributed to space as an important constituent of the learning environment (the „Third Pedagogue“). The researchers focus on spatial arrangements and their implicit „messages“ about the pedagogical approaches behind them, which they make visible through the method of „mapping“.
In the course of the research project (accompanying the school development process), hundreds of photos were taken to document the areas of communication allocated to the students – either officially or informally „conquered“ by the students. These photos were in the next step shown to the faculties of the schools and interpreted by the researchers and the faculties themselves. The predominant conclusion was that most schools lack specific, welcoming areas for student communication. Several schools took action and created cozy corners in or outside classrooms where students now can get together during breaks and talk. Another focus was on documenting which spatial arrangements (e.g. of tables and chairs in a classroom) would indicate that more learner-centered forms of instruction would take place in a school – or whether the claims the schools had often made in their published school profiles (on their websites) were counteracted by the usual rows of tables and chairs facing the blackboard in most classrooms, clearly indicating a more teacher-centered approach.
Students of 5 schools were also asked to film their favorite places in and around school, and these films were exchanged and shown to the film teams and faculties of other schools. The faculty was asked to give feedback to the film teams of their own schools, the students to each other. The 4 schools in the control group were not involved in that process. An innovative aspect of this research is the use of „mapping“ as a research method – i.e. laying photographs next to each other and describing and interpreting the differences as results of development processes.
The next step will involve focusing on the forms of written communication inside and outside the school buildings and the degree to which schools with plurilingual students reflect this diversity in their official communication with students and parents. Are important messages translated into various L1s? Is L1 support of any kind available? Are students encouraged to attend L1 instruction? Are any languages other than German visible/audible in and around the school? Is language and language use a topic of instruction? And is the role of the language of instruction consciously seen and acknowledged by the teachers? Apart from the available photo documents, a number of school visits by members of the research team supplemented by interviews should help to clarify the answers to these questions. Finally the researchers hope to compile a list of recommendations on how to create school policies that, on one hand, stress the importance of communicative processes and, on the other hand, clearly and consciously foster all kinds of language development (L1, L2, L3) for students and teachers.
References
Heil, C. (2007). Kartierende Auseinandersetzung mit aktueller Kunst. Erfinden und Erforschen von Vermittlungssituationen. München 2007
Legwie, H. (2000). Feldforschung und teilnehmende Beobachtung, In: Flick, Uwe u.a.(Hg.): Qualitative Sozialforschung. Ein Handbuch. München: Rowohlt
Schrittesser, I., Fraundorfer, A., Krainz-Dürr, M. (2012). Innovative Learning Environments. Wien: facultas.wuv.
Stiller, J. (in Vorb.). Gegen das blinde Sehen – empirische Rezeptionsforschung im Unterrichtfach Kunst. Dortmunder Schriften zur Kunst, Band 4.
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