How are cultural values effectively conveyed?

Intercultural competence, meaning the ability to live and work with people from different cultural backgrounds, is now essential for a successful personal and professional future. The aim of the “World LAB” project is to teach this skill in schools by bringing refugees and young people without a refugee background together through a range of different workshops. How effective these workshops are is now being examined as part of an accompanying study carried out by the Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg Professional School of Education (PSE).

Intercultural competence, meaning the ability to live and work with people from different cultural backgrounds, is now essential for a successful personal and professional future. The aim of the “World LAB” project is to teach this skill in schools by bringing refugees and young people without a refugee background together through a range of different workshops. How effective these workshops are is now being examined as part of an accompanying study carried out by the Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg Professional School of Education (PSE).

In the “World LAB”, a joint project between the Global Ethic Foundation and the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports Baden-Württemberg, young people get to grips with their own value systems under professional supervision and focus on creating a shared set of values. Then they work on a student project, which they choose in groups of two and then plan and carry out together. At the end of every school year, the best projects will then be chosen and given a prize.

This helps both schoolchildren as well as teaching staff and social workers to create spaces where people can meet and develop democratic ways of negotiating. Following a pilot phase, the World LAB will be put into practice for the next three school years from 2019/20 onwards. Around 150 academic and vocational schools will take part, involving more than 9,000 schoolchildren as well as 378 members of teaching staff.

Initial evaluation

However, it has not yet been possible to evaluate the quality of the projects created and to what extent the program actually achieves the goals that it sets out to do. This is the aim of a piece of accompanying research, which is funded with 765,000 euros over three years from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts. The investigation is carried out by the universities of Stuttgart and Hohenheim as well as the Ludwigsburg University of Education, and therefore by three of the five institutions which together make up the Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg Professional School of Education (PSE).

The results of the evaluation should first of all contribute towards any possible improvements to the way the project is structured. Secondly, it should also provide a basis and an impetus for intercultural communication to then be introduced as part of teacher education at universities. The results of the research project should also be presented to the public and the scientific community.

Since 2016, the five universities providing teacher education and training in the Stuttgart area — the Ludwigsburg University of Education, the University of Stuttgart, the University of Hohenheim, the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart — constitute the Professional School of Education Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg (PSE). Jointly, they want to further develop teacher education and training in a profession-oriented way. Within the PSE, the participating universities optimize the education for teaching at lower and upper secondary schools by pooling and further developing the particular strengths of the universities and other partners, such as the State Seminars for Didactics and Teacher Education, in the scientific disciplines and their respective teaching methodologies as well as in the fields of pedagogy and educational science.

The PSE has been successful with its applications for funding in the past. The projects currently ongoing at PSE include Teacher Education PLUS (BMBF), KOALA (MWK), the service point for the State Examination for Teachers (QuaLIKiSS), and MakEd_digital (BMBF).