Zuwanderung und Migration

The article deals with a change in public, political, and scientific understanding of migration and integration issues, which has to be taken into account by organisations of adult and continuing education. Furthermore the present focus on migration and integration offers new challenges as well as opportunities to improve the role of organisations of adult and continuing education in shaping the German society as an immigration society.

A planned offer of further education organisations, orientated by the participant`s needs and interests, implies empirically confirmed data. The situation of data concerning further education behaviour and -interests of migrants in Germany referring to this is however moderate. This is on the one hand due to the definition problem of such constructs as “further education” and “people from migrant background” and adjunct to the difficulties with the operationalisation. On the other hand the data collection is complex in this subject area. On the basis of data of the report system further education Berichtssystem Weiterbildung (BSW) and the socio-economic panel Sozioökonomisches Panel (SOEP) anapproach is made in this contribution

Due to special legal status, differences in social structure, and fewer chances on the labor market, people with migration background are less successful in initial schooling and vocational training programs. They are also under-represented in the area of adult education. The role of continuing education counseling, therefore, is to inform immigrants interested in education of the many individual educational opportunities that are available, to purposefully remove educational barriers, and to provide insight into prospects for long-term development of professional competence. To accomplish this, the cultural background of a client must be included in the counseling process.

Further education is regarded as an investment in the future, in which large parts of the population of Germany participate. However not all groups benefit from this investment in equal measure. The contribution particularly focuses on the further education situation of migrants. A subsequent subscription of the development of pedagogical concepts of deficit- and adaption orientated basic approaches from the early 1970s up to the current stronger resource- and integration orientated offers. The author sees the lack of sustainability in the educational work for and with migrants accounted most of all in that so far it has succeeded too little to transfer successful offers into regular offers of further education.

Intercultural education accepts the “otherness“ in multicultural and multireligious societies. It struggles against discrimination and seeks equality. Migrants and native people are both target groups of intercultural education. The article discusses educational questions in the German context with regard to different nationality, culture, religion and mother tongue. “Intracultural” education is necessary to strengthen personal and social identity; intercultural education can initiate dialogue and encounter between people and groups with different ethnic, cultural and religious background and it can show ways to resolve conflicts between those groups.