Researchers from Paderborn University and Jena University publish results from practical collaboration
The transition from school to working life often presents major challenges. Researchers from Paderborn University and Jena University have investigated how educationally disadvantaged young people who are impaired by factors such as background, experiences of flight, learning difficulties or disabilities can be supported through a strengths-based approach. The research and development project "Self-staging practices as access to a self-determined, multimodal skills assessment for young people with educational disadvantages" - SeiP for short - has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with around 500,000 euros since 2022 and has now been successfully completed. Together with stakeholders from district governments and vocational colleges in North Rhine-Westphalia as well as Lebenshilfe für Menschen mit geistiger oder anderer Behinderung Kreisverband Paderborn e. V., the researchers have developed a concept for development-promoting skills assessment that deliberately focuses on the skills and potential of young people.
A multi-phase concept including corresponding materials was developed in the project, which offers educational stakeholders guidance for the didactic design. How the concept is integrated at the different schools and how the didactic process for self-presentation is organised varies greatly depending on the school-specific requirements and needs of the young people. To this end, the educational stakeholders were accompanied by Dr Heike Kundisch from the Chair of Business and Vocational Education at Paderborn University. Particular attention was paid to providing the participating teams at the schools and vocational colleges with opportunities to develop ideas together. This resulted in self-presentation formats such as business sedcards designed by the students as alternative application formats, short videos or voice messages, self-portraits and collages. "It was also important to us to include the young people's perspectives and to open up spaces for them to shape their own learning and development processes. Self-determination and personal responsibility are essential, especially against the backdrop of social changes such as the increasingly complex transformation processes in work and education," emphasises Franziska Otto from Paderborn University, another researcher on the project.
"We have found that access via self-presentation practices - i.e. methods in which young people present their skills and competences in a creative way - is a good approach to designing training preparation that is geared towards strengths. The task now is to provide vocational colleges with a framework for dealing with the concepts in future projects - for example through further training formats for teachers," explains Prof Dr H.-Hugo Kremer, joint project leader and Professor of Business and Vocational Education at Paderborn University.
All publications, results and publications from the project are available online .
This text was translated automatically.
