Primary School Research Conference 2008
Invitation

Dear Sir or Madam,
dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the Commission’s Chairperson, Professor Dr. Friederike Heinzel (University of Kassel), we cordially invite you to the 17th Annual Commission Conference on “Primary School Research and First Grade Pedagogy” of the German Society for Educational Science (DGfE, School Pedagogy Section) with the title

The Europeanization of Education
Consequences and Challenges
for Primary School Pedagogy
24.-26.09.2008
Bergische University of Wuppertal

With the school achievement studies of PISA and PIRLS we find ourselves in a phase of internationalisation of the education debate which will have sustainable consequences for the regulation of the educational system and the inner development of schools and tuition.

With the introduction of educational standards and centralised achievement tests, school education should provide the security needed for equal chances in education. At the same time educational standards and comparative studies, which function as an instrument of external system control leading to a homogenisation of work in primary schools, cannot take into account the heterogeneity of individual learning capabilities and the possibilities of children’s development.

How European countries adapt themselves to the requirements of the knowledge society and honour the societal mandate for integration and participation through education at the primary level, is a central question of educational politics and will be taken up and discussed at the conference. The question will be considered as to which effects the processes of school decentralisation with simultaneous and capacious standardisation and external examination of required achievements will have.

The question of the Europeanization of education also incorporates in a curricular perspective the tuition of multilingualism. The encouragement of multilingualism and the mastery of three languages in the Europe of the future represent the language-political goals of the European Union, which national educational politics also have to take on and incorporate into their school curricula.

In order to establish a European perspective in primary school pedagogy which encourages multilingualism and encompasses learning languages at an early age – without repressing tuition for children from migrating families in their mother language – is a central disciplinary assignment which will be taken up and discussed at the conference in an international comparative perspective. The Europeanization of education is to be understood as a Europe-wide multicultural integration scheme, which begins at the elementary stage and leads to a cultivation of linguistical and intercultural learning.

A stronger international alignment of primary school research is in the light of the internationalisation of education a requirement that primary school pedagogy as a scientific research tradition will demand at this conference. The goal of the conference is, therefore, also to create impulses for the advancement of primary school research, which incorporates international research developments on the primary level and positions them in international research contexts and research networks.

With best wishes

Prof. Dr. Charlotte Röhner and Colleagues

"Pedagogy of Early Childhood and the Primary Level"
in Faculty G – Institute of Pedagogy and Social Sciences – of the Bergische University of Wuppertal