laeneAS: The Rural Educational Environments of Young Refugees in Professorial Recruitment

The laeneAs research project aims both to identify barriers to education and to promote successful educational pathways for young refugees in professorial recruitment. In rural areas in particular, there is a great need to catch up on educational programmes to accompany training. At the same time, the needs of young people are great. For this reason, innovative educational programmes integrative to vocational training are to be researched and further developed with the help of real-world laboratories in rural regions. Real-world laboratories are a socio-spatial methodological approach that combines research and practical development. To this end, the key players in the formal, non-formal and informal learning and living environments are brought together with the participation of young refugees. The lifeworld expertise is to be used both for a contextual conditional analysis of structural, social and individual barriers to education as well as for the transfer into practice. The objective is therefore aimed at the research-based further development of extracurricular educational programmes in the direction of best practice models for successfully accompanying professorial recruitment.
The focus is on the following three levels of investigation:
The identification of socio-structural, socio-spatial and individual barriers to education, taking into account gender and diversity-conscious perspectives in their specificity for social participation in rural areas or in various rural regions.
The research-based practical development of best practice models for the removal of structural barriers and for the support of successful educational biographies through the networking of educational stakeholders in innovative educational programmes.
The inclusion of young people's perspectives in order to explore their subjective perceptions and experiences of educational environments and to involve them in participatory project development.
A mixed methods approach will be implemented. The focus will be on several workshops in the real-world laboratories, which will take the form of future workshops and group discussions. These will be accompanied by interviews with experts. In addition, a participatory peer research group will be set up to incorporate the subjective perspective of refugee trainees in the identification of educational barriers and in the development of best practice models.
The laeneAs project is working in collaboration with the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and is organising real-world laboratories at two locations in Bavaria and Brandenburg. In each case, one district is located near an urban centre. In Brandenburg this is the district of Märkisch-Oderland and in Bavaria the district of Eichstätt. A second district is geographically peripheral; this is the district of Ostprignitz-Ruppin in Brandenburg and the district of Schwandorf in Bavaria. With Brandenburg as an eastern German state and Bavaria as a southern German state, very different historical, social and educational policy conditions are included.