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12/07/2021 | Pressemitteilung

Research project examines "threshold period" of home education

In the wake of the protest movements around 1968, criticism of the home education system emerged in the German-speaking world. Reactions to this were more or less radical reform initiatives. Nevertheless, quite a few children and adolescents ended up in barely changed care institutions for at least two more decades. This threshold period between change and persistence, which has received little scholarly attention to date, is now being examined by an international research project with the participation of the University of Kassel.

The project is entitled "Negotiating Educational Spaces in Residential Care 1970-1990. An Interdisciplinary Comparison of Transformation Processes in Austria, Germany and Switzerland". In this three-year project - funded by the German Research Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund and the Swiss National Science Foundation - the University of Kassel, the University of Innsbruck and the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland are cooperating on a transnational basis.

The starting point is the observation that institutions of home education in Germany, Austria and Switzerland reacted differently to the social change triggered by the 1968 movement. Although some of the protest movements vehemently questioned the educational institutions and the social order enforced there, this did not lead to fundamental changes everywhere in equal measure. The thesis of the end of institutional and welfare education in the 1970s in German-speaking countries is therefore only partially true.

For this reason, the research project uses the example of selected regions - Tyrol/Vorarlberg, Hesse and Zurich - to investigate the uneven dynamics and developmental conditions of reform processes in institutional education. The project examines negotiation processes around changing educational spaces in the 1970s and 1980s from a research perspective grounded in spatial theory. For this purpose, archival materials and interviews with contemporary witnesses will be evaluated.

The aim of the research project is to provide an adequate and differentiated description of a hitherto little researched threshold period, which will yield new insights into recent home history and provide methodologies for researching welfare state transformations. At the same time, a contribution to the understanding of enduring and changing structural characteristics in a specific segment of public education, home education, is to be made.

The Kassel subproject is headed by Prof. Dr. Mechthild Bereswill at the Institute of Social Work. It focuses on developments in the 1970s and 1980s in Hesse. Here, high-profile protests took place in the 1969 home campaign, primarily against educational homes run by the Hesse State Welfare Association.

Further information: https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb01/institute/institut-fuer-sozialwesen/fachgebiete/soziologie-sozialer-differenzierung-und-soziokultur/forschung/die-aushandlung-von-erziehungsraeumen

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Mechthild Bereswill
University of Kassel
Department 01 - Institute of Social Welfare
Department of Sociology of Social Differentiation and Socioculture
E-mail: bereswill[at]uni-kassel[dot]de