Around one million refugees are estimated to have come to Germany in 2015 (see BAMF 2015). Among them are families, fleeing from war, persecution and destruction, with children, who are bound to go to school in Germany. These are the conditions, under which GeKOS was implemented. GeKOS (shorthand for ‘Gemeinsam entdecken Kinder ihren Ort mit Studierenden’; the English translation would be ‘Students and pupils discover their town together‘) is a project aimed at students and refugee children alike: It tries to take an active role in supporting refugee children and at the same time contributes to the professionalization of student teachers and pedagogues for their work with refugees. In our paper, we want to outline the project and discuss some early findings from accompanying research.

On the one hand, the project seeks to contribute to the social and cultural integration of refugee children into their new home region through incidental and tacit learning (see Schugurensky 2000) of language skills, cultural traditions and habits. Once a week, the tandems spend their leisure time together, take part in various activities and they explore the neighborhood. In doing this, they look for common interests and share different cultural rituals. On the other hand, future pedagogues and teachers need intercultural and reflective competences in order to deal professionally with the increasing diversity in children’s milieus (see Kumar & Karabenick 2009). Within the project the students gain valuable insights into the special situation of refugees in Germany while they get to know the living environments, the everyday life and the parents of their mentees. By reflecting on their experiences in accompanying seminars the students learn to question their first impressions as well as prejudice, fears and stereotypes they might have.

Our presentation will focus on two questions:

(1) Which research methods can be applied to adequately document and evaluate learning processes and outcomes within the project? We aim at goals on various levels (e.g. language, social integration, cultural knowledge of the children as well as professional development of the students), which poses the challenge of how to integrate the diversity of data and methods into a coherent concept.

(2) At the same time we also have to acknowledge the ethical question of being sensible to the high amount of trust such documentation requires from refugee families and teacher students. How can we strike a balance between their interests and the needs of our scientific enquiry?

BAMF (2015). Aktuelle Zahlen zu Asyl. Published online: https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Downloads/Infothek/Statistik/Asyl/statistik-anlage-teil-4-aktuelle-zahlen-zu-asyl.pdf?__blob=publicationFile (last access Jan 6th 2016) Kumar, Revathy & Stuart A. Karabenick (2009). Creating Productive Learning Environments in Culturally Pluralistic Classrooms. In Lawrence J. Saha & Anthony G. Dworkin (ed.), International Handbook of Research on Teachers and Teaching. New York: Springer, pp. 653-668 Schugurensky, Daniel (2000). The Forms of Informal Learning: Towards a Conceptualization of the Field. Published online by the Centre for the Study of Education and Work: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/2733/2/19formsofinformal.pdf (last access: Jan 12th 2016)