24 January marks the International Day of Education celebrating the role of learning for peace and development. Education faces various challenges in modern society. Technological, demographic, social, environmental, economic and political shifts are forcing us to redefine what our education should be. Monitoring educational and social developments and revising policies makes it possible to deal with this diversity of individuals and their environments effectively.
A wide variety of research projects at the University of Luxembourg highlight innovative approaches and methodologies for education, learning, and social development in highly diverse, multilingual and multicultural societies, such as the projects DigiFam and PIONEERED at the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences.
How digital media helps to learn to speak, read and write
Postdoctoral researcher Maria Obojska has recently obtained FNR CORE funding for her project DigiFam: Digital Media as Language and Literacy Learning Spaces in Multilingual Families. The grant supports the scientific quality of Luxembourg’s public research in the category 21st century education – Learning in a multilingual and diverse society.
In the context of migration, many families find it necessary to learn new languages and maintain their mother tongues. Pioneering studies suggest that digital media may be a great resource in this endeavour, however, at the moment there is little systematic knowledge on how transnational families employ digital media for language and literacy learning. The DigiFam project addresses this knowledge gap and aims to provide information on how adults and children in transnational families in Luxembourg make use of various digital media to learn languages and literacy.
“The project will be able to contribute knowledge on a topic which is of particular significance in times of a global pandemic, when most of the learning went online,” says Maria Obojska, principal investigator of the DigiFam project.
Tackling educational inequalities
March 2021 will see the start of the new Horizon 2020 project PIONEERED – Pioneering policies and practices tackling educational inequalities in Europe. Coordinated by Prof. Dr Andreas Hadjar from the University of Luxembourg in collaboration with the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research (Dr. Aigul Alieva), it will involve research partners from Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, Norway, Spain and Switzerland.
PIONEERED will identify policies and tools to reduce (intersectional) inequalities in access to, uptake and completion of education, both in schools and beyond (like families and childcare settings). The research team will map emerging and existing sources of educational inequalities over the course of educational careers from early childhood to University education. It will also map measures on different levels (policies, school practices) in terms of pioneering policies and practices to identify most promising tools, pioneering policies and practices in the European countries that are studied in the project and beyond.
“At the end of the project, we attempt to have gathered a list of promising measures against educational inequalities. Such measures may relate to school structures and selection procedures, teaching styles and classroom composition” says Prof. Dr Hadjar.