BEB-CoP Research Project

The corona pandemic is a global phenomenon posing a great challenge to all societies and their institutions, such as schools. Children and adolescents are considered especially at risk of being adversely affected with regard to their schooling. Prognoses suggest that existing educational disadvantages will be exacerbated, especially for children and adolescents from underprivileged backgrounds. The reasons can be found in (partial) school closures as well as in the school-related and domestic options for digital teaching. The goal of the BEB-CoP project is to take a comparative look at impediments to and opportunities for social and academic participation among schoolchildren from underprivileged and privileged backgrounds in Germany and Canada in the vulnerable transition from childhood to adolescence. The study will focus especially on the experiences of schoolchildren in the lower grades of secondary school during the pandemic. Findings will be based on information from group discussions. There will also be interviews with school managers and class teachers. On the basis of a comparison of schoolchildren in socioeconomic underprivileged and privileged families in Germany and Canada and of multiform vs. single-form school systems, milieu-specific researchers will reconstruct impediments to and opportunities for social and academic participation. The comparison with Canada, where educational success and social background did not correlate as strongly as in Germany prior to the pandemic and that is a leader in the development of school digitalization among OECD countries, will yield new findings about designing innovative educational measures for sustainable (educational) justice and digitalization during and after crises as well as practical scientific findings for teacher training.

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Tanja Sturm
Project members: Dr. Edina Schneider, Anica Löchel