Team

Viola B. Georgi is a Professor for Diversity Education at the University of Hildesheim and the Director of the Center for Diversity, Democracy and Inclusion in Education in Migration Societies (ZBI). Between 2006 and 2012, she served as a junior professor for Intercultural Education at the Freie Universität of Berlin. In 2010 she became a visiting professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. Previously she worked as a research associate at the Department of Social Sciences of the Goethe University in Frankfurt and at the Center for Applied Policy Research of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. She studied Education and Sociology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, the University of Bristol (GB) and Harvard University (USA).

Work and research interests:

• Diversity Education
• Intercultural education and professionalization
• Diversity in Educational Media
• Holocaust Education
• Pluralization of Historical Images
• Democracy Education
• Citizenship Education

www.uni-hildesheim.de/angewandte-erziehungswissensch/mitglieder/georgi/

Nadin Tettschlag is the scientific coordinator and general manager of the Center for Diversity, Democracy and Inclusion in Education (ZBI). She supports teaching and research at the Institute of Educational Science, manages and accompanies projects in research and knowledge transfer in the thematic field of inclusion and migration society.

She studied Social Work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, focusing on migration, integration and transnational perspectives. Subsequently, she earned her Ph.D. in the DFG Research Training Group "Transnational Social Support" at the Institute for Social and Organizational Education of the University of Hildesheim on NGO cooperation in the field of social work and development cooperation between Europe and Latin America. Between 2013 and 2018 he worked as a Research Associate at the Georg Eckert Institute - Leibniz Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig and in the educational project "Zwischentoene / Nuances - classroom ressources for diversity".

Work and research interests:

• Diversity Education / Racism Critical Education
• Diversity and Educational Media
• (Educational) Organizations
• Qualitative Research

Nurten Karakaş studied Educational Science at the TU Berlin. She then founded a youth welfare agency and led it for ten years. The main focus of the agency lies on stationary assistance for underage unaccompanied refugees and outpatient assistance for families, predominantly with a migration background. Amongst other things, she was a lecturer at the Alice-Salomon-Hochschule Berlin, at the Theological College Friedensau and at the University of Hildesheim. She participated in the research project "Diversity in the staff room" at Freie Universität Berlin. She is a doctorate candidate. In her Ph.D. research project, she deals with the following questions: How do immigrant teachers deal with racism (experiences) in schools and which coping strategies did they develop?

Nurten Karakaş is the coordinator of the Doctoral School “Bildungsintegration”.

Work and research interests:

• Theories of Racism
• Concepts of Diversity
• Intercultural Orientation and Opening of Organizations
• Migration

Emma Rehr studied Educational Science at the University of Bielefeld (M.A.) and the Philipps University of Marburg (B.A.) with a focus on migration education, cultural work and civic education. Emma Rehr is concerned with the critical potential of creative interventions and questions possibilities for action under contradictory conditions. As a lecturer, educational consultant, trainer, and advisor, Emma Rehr co-designs interfaces between science and practice, between creativity and critique, and between culture and education.

Work and research interests:

• Critique of racism and discrimination
• Gender and Migration
• postcolonial studies
• Intersectionality
• Creativity and action orientation
• Societal participation

E-Mail: rehr(at)uni-hildesheim.de

Agata Wiezorek worked as a speech therapist with a focus on child language, multilingualism and mutism. After her bachelor's degree in special education, she studied educational science at the Foundation University of Hildesheim (M.A.). The focus on diversity education and the study of representations in media for children permeate her academic career. Since November 2017, she has been working on her PhD under Prof. Viola B. Georgi, investigating racializing practices of representation and differentiation in educational media of early childhood, their historical transformations and continuities, using the motif 'Children of the World'. Currently she accompanies the projects 'Stories in Motion' and 'Migration Lab Germany' as a research assistant. Privately, Agata Wiezorek is passionate about pop culture with a preference for diversity in games, literature, comics, board games and children's media.

Work and research interests:

• Diversity education and critique of racism
• Educational media, especially children's literature and games
• Discourse analysis and representation critique

wiezorek(at)uni-hildesheim.de

Britta Schellenberg teaches and conducts research at the Institute for Educational Science and the Center for Educational Integration. Previously, she worked at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where she led various regional, national and international projects, most recently at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute for Political Science. She works at the interface between science, educational practice and policy advice.

As part of her habilitation, she is analyzing challenges and needs for policy and education in the face of social change processes and heterogeneity in a plural society at the Center for Educational Integration. 

In addition, since 2017 she has been leading the educational program "Den Menschen im Blick. Kompetenzen gegen Rassismus und Diskriminierung in Beruf & Alltag" (Competencies against Racism and Discrimination in Work and Everyday Life), which provides training for employees and managers of public and private organizations (www.den-menschen-im-blick.de ).

Work and research focus:

• Diversity Education/ Education Critical of Racism and Sensitive to Discrimination
• Democracy education, human rights education, political education
• Prevention and Intervention
• Heterogeneity in a plural society
• Right-wing radicalism
• Framing and discourse analysis

Lena Kahle completed her doctorate in sociology at Goethe University in Frankfurt/M. on the topic of agency and belonging in polarized societies. Her focus was a reconstructive biographical-narrative study with Jewish and Arab Israelis from Coexistence Education in Israel. Her work was published by Barbara Budrich in 2017. The PhD was supported by a scholarship from the Hans Böckler Foundation. Following her doctorate, Lena Kahle held a position as a research assistant at the Center for Digital Systems at Freie Universität Berlin. There she worked with Verena Nägel on a study of teaching and research on the Holocaust at German universities, which was published in 2018. Lena Kahle studied political science at the Otto Suhr Institute of Freie Universität Berlin, where she graduated in 2008. Her thesis presented a study on the political culture of memory in Israel. During her diploma and doctoral studies, Lena Kahle focused intensively on Israeli society with a focus on citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, coexistence education, interaction and conflict. The questions of memory today in Germany, Europe and also in Israel is a theme that runs through her work.

Work and research focus:

• Qualitative methods
• Interpretative social research
• Process analyses in biographies
• Social theoretical questions of belonging in modern societies
• Agency or agency theories
• The methodology of the Chicago School

Sina Freund studied cultural studies with a focus on literary studies and political science as a second subject at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She completed her Master's degree at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2017 in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy. Alongside her studies, she worked for the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, where she conducted guided tours, study days, and international youth encounters as a freelancer. Her PhD project focuses on the recognition of education in the context of migration and integration.

Research interests:

• Discourses of integration in educational policy
• Educational stereotypes
• Images of self and others in processes of educational integration
• Intersections of different forms of discrimination
• Migration and language
• Gender and migration

• January 2018 - November 2018: Collaborator in the project "Inklusive Lehrer_innenbildung - MitSprache im Fach" (iLeb 3.0), cooperation project of the Center for Teacher Education and Educational Research (CeLeB) and the Platform Future Inclusion (ZINK).
• Since April 2017:Research Associate, Department of Applied Educational Science/Center for Educational Integration - Diversity and Democracy in Migration Societies".
• February 2016 - May 2017: Project assistant in the externally funded project "QuaSp - Qualifying Students" in cooperation with the Georg-August-University Göttingen and the Leuphana-University Lüneburg (in connection with the Mercator project "Umbrüche gestalten - Sprachenförderung und -bildung Bestandteile innovativer Lehramtsausbildung in Niedersachsen")

Janina Vernal Schmidt teaches at the Department of Education (Applied Educational Science). She studied hispanic literature and language teaching and learning with a focus on German as a foreign language at the University of Hamburg.

She worked at the University of Hamburg and at the University of Bremen as a research fellow in the department of Teaching Romance languages (Spanish). She then worked at the Humboldt University in Berlin as a teaching assistant for Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language and as a research assistant at the Institute for German Language and Literature at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg. Moreover, she developed a qualification module for students in German as a Foreign Language in cooperation with the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen and the University of Hildesheim as part of a project with a focus on language development and educational integration. Most recently, she was a Coordinator at the Center for Educational Integration - Diversity and Democracy in Migration Societies.

Janina Vernal Schmidt earned her Ph.D. at the University of Bremen in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language on the topic "Culture in Spanish Classes - A Reconstructive Case Study on a Task-Oriented and Film-Based Lesson Unit in Secondary Education".

Work and research interests:

• Multilingualism
• Diversity
• Migration
• Diversity Education
• Antiracist and Intercultural Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language
• Educational Media
• Reconstructive Social Research

Z. Ece Kaya is a political scientist (Dipl. University of Istanbul/M.A. University of Frankfurt) and holds a doctorate in education. Her dissertation on "Colonial Pedagogical Writings in the Nazi Era. On the History of Colonial Racism in German Educational Science" at the University of Frankfurt in the Institute for General Educational Science was funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and awarded the Werner Pünder Prize in 2017. She translated, among others, the books "Schulzeit unterm Hitlerbild" (Benjamin Ortmeyer) and "Die Nummer auf dem Arm meines Großvaters" (David A. Adler) into Turkish. Since 2016, she has been researching and teaching on topics related to educational research on anti-Semitism and racism. From April 2018 to the end of March 2021, she was also co-director of the Research Center on Nazi Pedagogy at the University of Frankfurt. Since April 2021, she has been a research associate at ZBI and currently teaches on educational approaches critical of anti-Semitism and racism in the school context.

Work and research interests:

• Educational research on anti-Semitism and racism and educational practice critical of racism
• Educational science during the NS-era and NS-pedagogy
• History and theories of education in the field of tension between politics and education
• Postcolonial perspectives on migration and education
• Critical discourse analysis

Danielle Gluns heads the Migration Policy Research and Transfer Office at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Hildesheim. The goal of the position is to promote exchange between academia and practice in the field of migration policy. 

Previously, Danielle Gluns was a research associate at the Institute of Political Science at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster. Most recently, she was involved in a research project on cooperation between civil society and municipalities in the integration of refugees. At the same time, she completed her PhD on housing and urban development in growing cities after studying International Migration and Intercultural Relations (M.A.) and European Studies (B.A.) at the University of Osnabrück. 

Work and research interests:

• Migration, flight and asylum
• Integration policy
• Social Participation
• Multilevel Governance
• Qualitative Research 

Fanny Petermann is the coordinator of the project "Diversity and Equal Opportunities in Teaching and Learning" at the Foundation University of Hildesheim. In the cooperative project of the ZBI and the Equal Opportunity Office, diversity monitoring forms the starting point for the participatory development of measures for studying and teaching.

Previously, Fanny Petermann worked in various application-oriented research projects and was a scholarship holder in the DFG Research Training Group "Transnational Social Support" at the Institute for Social and Organizational Pedagogy at the University of Hildesheim. Most recently, she worked on the project "Conception of Survey Modules on Student Diversity" at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen. There she also completed her studies in Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, Gender Studies and Art History.

Work and research interests:

• Diversity and discrimination
• Racism and postcolonial perspectives
• Science-practice transfer
• Discourse research

Isabelle C. M. Lohrengel has been studying teaching (Art & German) at the  University of Hildesheim since 2016. In her Bachelor's thesis, she dealt with "Diversity Sensitivity in and through Picture Books" and conducted a qualitative-empirical study on the potentials of visual figures for the perspective-taking of secondary school students in picture book conversations. Since 2019 she studies in the master of education "Lehramt an Haupt- und Realschulen".

Research interests:

• Diversity sensitivity in/through educational media, especially picture (books)
• Philosophizing with children
• Inclusion: accessibility & social participation
• Democracy education
• Human rights

E-Mail: lohren (at) uni-hildesheim.de

University of Hildesheim
Institute for Educational Science
Department of Applied Educational Science
Universitätsplatz 1
31141 Hildesheim

Kimberly Daubert has been studying teaching (art and German) at the Foundation University of Hildesheim since 2017. Since 2021 she studies the double study program Master ,,Lehramt für Grundschule" with the Master ,,Deutsch als Zweitsprache/ Fremdsprache" in Hildesheim. 

Main interests:

• Educational media, especially games and television programs
• multilingualism in education/ language(s) and participation
• pedagogical computer games research
• diversity-sensitive teaching/educational media

E-Mail: daubert@uni-hildesheim.de

Foundation University of Hildesheim
Center for Educational Integration