Mag.a Sarah Sophia Straub

Mentoring Inclusive Citizenship Education.
A multilevel approach to educational and democratic experience for marginalized young people through 1:1 mentoring.

Supervision: Dirk Lange
Period: October 2018 – January 2022
Contact: sarah.straub@univie.ac.at

The high dropout rates of marginalized young people from compulsory schooling and lack of opportunities for upward mobility in education for pupils from low-income and/or low-educated families within the Austrian schooling system indicate a strong mandate for inclusion strategies of this risk group.

The problem formulated requires a problem solving strategy with a multilevel (individual development, participatory interaction and educational policy) and interdisciplinary (Political Sciences, Educational Sciences, Psychology) approach to theoretical and empirical research, in order to derive new findings around the phenomenon of inclusive citizenship education of primary school children.

This research approach examines mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion according to the model of inclusive citizenship education (Lange/ Kleinschmidt 2016) shedding light on how people can be enabled through non-formal educational processes, to participate actively in political and social life. A qualitative, empirical research using an explorative study, will help to examine 1:1 mentoring for school children as a comprehensive tool to offer social and political inclusion and equal educational opportunities as part of an extra-curricular education.

This study aims to contribute to the wider field of Democracy Research and more specifically to the field of Didactics of Political Education, as it serves to understand correlations between individual learning experiences in mentoring and citizenship awareness Bürgerbewusstsein (Lange 2008)