Conference Agenda

The WHO (2020) assumes that in Europe at least every third to fifth child at primary level is affected by family violence experiences in the narrow sense. For Germany, the ninth family report notes an "increase in psychological maltreatment, physical abuse and neglect" (BMFSFJ 2021, 291f.) of children, while the values for identified sexual abuse seem to remain comparatively stable. With the report, domestic violence and high-conflict cases in separation and divorce proceedings are also classified as child welfare risks for the first time. For Europe, we must therefore assume a significantly higher proportion of children affected by violence that we encounter every day in the education system. In addition, the number of unreported cases that are exposed to violent attacks and hurtful behavior by adults in institutionalised public contexts (e.g. religious communities, clubs, day-care-centres, schools) must be added. The range of forms of adult violence to which children can be exposed is structurally multiplied, since gender relations, social conditions of inequality and culturalisation in the sense of "doing difference" (West & Fenstermaker 1995) influence risks.

However, child protection is not only an extremely diverse field of pedagogical work on the side of the addressees, but is also determined by organizational diversity. In the school context, actors from different pedagogical professions and habits come together and are expected to work more or less closely with the organizations of social work in interorganizational cooperation. However, although the European discourse assigns schools an "important role in protecting children from violence" (Dimitrova-Stull 2014, 7), German teachers only rarely have legal and action security in dealing with child welfare risks or knowledge of counselling options in interorganizational cooperation with the youth welfare system (e.g. Zimmermann 2019). Contrary to the high number of cases and unreported figures, primary education is only involved in the provision of help in approx. 10% of cases, despite comprehensive contact with all children of primary school age (Federal Statistical Office 2022), but with 5% - 20% tolerates violating actions of professional, semi-professional and voluntary actors in lessons and everyday school life (Wysujack 2021): Which (counterproductive) pedagogical perspectives and practice patterns justify the neglect of child protection in school organizations?

While every day-care-centres in Germany have been legally obliged to follow a child protection concept since 2021, the perception of children's experiences of violence becomes an organizational grey area and at the same time a "risk for academic failure" when they enter primary school (UBKSM 2022). Despite the legal norms for active cooperation of school actors with the help system, which have been valid in Germany since 2012 and which would allow primary schools as organizational network partners a central position for the design of communal protection concepts (Retzar 2011), school organizational identities do not seem to perceive the structural mandate for participation in child protection as an "intermediary practice" (Evers & Ewert 2010, 117). The organizational heterogeneity of child protection ranges from interventions in individual cases, to structural cooperation concepts, to design options of teaching units, assessment practices and design of programmatic elements of everyday school life (Spies 2022). As multipliers of teacher education, schools also pass on the conceptual gaps of child protection to future generations: We present here interim findings of a qualitative research project on knowledge levels and practices of school actors, which are passed on to future teachers as organizational intervention and prevention perspectives on child protection. We pursue the question, which organizational perspectives and practices do school actors represent when they explain their action and organizational maxims in child protection in the context of their training mandate?

The educational transition from Primary Education to Compulsory Secondary Education is one of the most relevant transformations processes that take place within the educational system. Some studies show that these processes, in some cases, appear as coherent and, in others, as discontinuous ones. In any case, researchers agree on the change perspective of this educational transition. Gimeno Sacristán (2007) defines this process as

[…] a critical moment, valid, because it is an expression of social diversity and of different organizational models and differentiated professional styles, and also a potentially problematic puzzle for subjects who have to move between different schools or territories (p. 19).

In Spain, researchers (Bharara, 2019; Gimeno Sacristán, 1996; Monarca et al., 2013; Tarabini, 2020) focussed more on the discontinuity than the continuity between institutional cultures, that is, more focused on the barriers than on the elements that favour them. In any case, the researchers agree about educational transitions as essential in the trajectories of students since they influence their personal, family and social development. The discontinuities of these transition processes are constituted as a selection process (Gimeno Sacristán, 1996; Monarca et al., 2013), associated or in convergence with the processes of dropping out and school failure, thus increasing the risk of social exclusion among adolescents and young people (Tarabini, 2020).

The educational transition should be a gradual, flexible and reflective process, as multiple psychological, sociological and pedagogical factors are involved in (Santana-Vega, 2015; Hargreaves, 1996; Evangelou et al., 2008; West et al., 2008; Jindal -Snape, et al., 2020). For Sacristán (1996), the educational transition must be understood as a continuous process with 2 dimesions: a horizontal or transversal continuity (between teachers, areas and subjects in a course) and another vertical and temporal connection of didactic elements during the school time. The author also states that most of the discontinuities and inconsistencies that hinder the transit processes affect occur in different dimensions such as in the relationships that are established within the educational community, the curriculum, the climate, the spaces for participation, the evaluation, the distribution of school and family time and the school organization in general. Some studies confirm these elements, and add others associated with the coexistence such as: the compliance with the rules, or the role of teachers, the pedagogy or the number of teachers among others (Ávila Francés et. Al., 2022; González Lorente and González Morga, 2015; González-Rodríguez, 2019).

Nevertheless, there are few studies on some proposals for improvement: the construction of a common pedagogical culture (Carbonell, 2002) and the coordination of all the pedagogical dimensions that intervene in the educational processes in public schools, such as the construction of a common inclusive curriculum (Payá, 2019).

This proposal is part of the research project, approved by the Spanish Ministry of Universities, called The Transition to Compulsory Secondary Education. Pedagogical Impact and Consequences whose general objective is to explore the process of transition to Compulsory Secondary Education and identify the conditioning factors involved in process. Delving into the elements that can generate social exclusion, and highlighting those that may be favouring the transition, allows us to suggest possible ways for improvement.

One of the major tasks of primary education is to cope with social inequalities on the one hand and to embrace diversity on the other. Research shows, that in particular in Germany – but also other European countries with highly selective school-systems – the social background has a string impact on educational trajectories (PISA etc.). Many approaches have been discussed to interrupt this relation, but these were merely located either as additive measures like school-social work or (social-) pedagogical initiatives besides schooling. Approaches that aim at organisational aspects of schooling with an emphasis on pedagogies are rarely discussed in the fields of primary education in Germany. However, there have been historical prototypes of successful social-space oriented primary education with reference to ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner 1981), that can be used as functional prototypes (Spies/Wischmann 2023) to reconstruct the role of organisational-pedagogy positions/reflections in school-development-processes supported by science and municipality. Our assumption is that a social space-oriented approach to primary schooling has organisational impact in terms of the recognition and valuing of diversity as a basic characteristic of primary education under unequal social conditions.

With the help of historical documents and retrospective explanations of the social space-oriented development of primary schools, we will reconstruct the relevance of the municipality as a networking agency in relation to the function of teaching and the relevance of community participation. In doing so, we will discuss the demand for coherence in organisational and multiprofessional pedagogical action for cooperation within the school and community networked educational relationship that made the "opening of school" possible. Therefore, we will present a project around the Wartburg Primary School in Muenster, which was both a model project of practice and a research project (Benner/Ramseger 1981, 1984).

The focus lies on the coherent interactions and relations of the stakeholders and bodies involved, we will look at the levels/contexts of the municipality, the classroom (teaching and learning) and community participation. To capture the socio-ecological interrelations and the interplay of social and school pedagogical action premises and bodies of knowledge, we interpret selected passages from the expert discussion authorised by Dietrich Benner (2023) and the specific historical and political contexts of the interaction between municipal steering interests and processes with the pedagogical implications in the interplay between school and social pedagogical approaches in the ecological systems oriented sense of community education (White 2014) that are thematised there. The educational theoretical perspectives are hermeneutically interpreted by selected anchor sequences from the project reporting and a later text on the political educational responsibility of the municipality (Janssen 1995) in order to draw conclusions on desiderata based on educational theory for the current design of organisational pedagogy issues of school-development of the primary sector in educational landscapes.