In this contribution results from an ongoing qualitative study will be presented that examines the interrelations between learning and socialisation in biographies of adolescent refugees.

Today “[a]n unprecedented 65.6 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 22.5 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.” (UNHCR 2017). In 2015 and 2016 about 1.2 million people came to Germany as refugees (BAMF 2017, 2017a, Hoffmeier-Zlotnik et al. 2017). A large proportion of the refugees are young people who have come either with their family or as unaccompanied refugee minors. A total of 36.7% of the 2016 asylum applications were submitted by people between the ages of 11 and 25 (ibid., p. 21).

But it is not only the number that makes this group important for educationalists and educators, e. g. because they have to be included in the education system and education is crucial for the integration into the arrival society (Ager and Strang 2008). It is also a group that has been socialised in particular – and rather heterogenous – ways, including specific learning experiences in a sensitive phase of personal development. Research shows that when migration takes place during adolescence, the young people have to cope with a “doubled transformation requirement” (King and Schwab 2000): they have to transform themselves into adults and at the same time their environment and their living conditions transform and they have to adopt to them. Of course, the kind of migration is has great impact, whether it is forced or not and if it has been forced by war or economic reasons.

Adolescence, according to King (2013), is an intergenerationally shaped psycho-social space of developmental opportunities. Hence, adolescence is neither just a particular age-range that refers to specific developmental tasks, nor is it merely a specific cohort of a society. It is both and it is more complex, because it includes the psychic dimension of the adolescent as well as his/her social interweaving with family and peers, and the broader social environment. Adolescence is always affected and formed by aspects of social inequality such as milieu, gender, and race (Günther et al. 2010). Therefore, the constitution of adolescence differs depending on the social positionality of the young person. If the social position of the adolescent is precarious and he/she is being discriminated, the quality of the psychosocial space for opportunities is impaired (Wischmann 2018). Against this background, the learning experiences of adolescent refugees will be reconstructed and the interweaving of different learning experiences with socialisation processes is part of the investigation.

Learning is understood here as a relational process of acquirement (Künkler 2011) that is embedded in in social structures, discourses, and practices. Learning, hence, is not located within a person, it rather takes place in relations to others, and also to particular (material, social, psychic) conditions. This applies equally to formal, informal, and non-formal learning.

Socialisation is the process of becoming a social being within the concrete context, concerning milieu and culture, a person is born into and grows up in. According to Bourdieu (1990) this process can be defined as a habutalisation including the incorporation of the (often implicit) rules of the community. These rules differ between different milieus and cultures, but once incorporated they cannot simply be changed. Socialisation includes and structures learning.

There has been little research on socialisation and learning of adolescent refugees so far (see e. g. Flores-Borques 1995). This contribution aims to tackle this desiderata.

To reconstruct how learning is experienced by the young refugees and at the same time how it is interwoven with socialisation, an open qualitative design has been chosen. Altogether about 30 biographic interviews (Schütze 1983) with refugees between 15 and 18 are planned. The first interviews have recently been conducted. The total number will arise as part of a theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss 1999). The interviews will be analysed with the reconstructive method according to Rosenthal (Rosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal 2004). After the single case analyses, types of adolescent learning in the contexts of flight and arrival (in Germany) will be generated.

The aim of this study is, to gain knowledge about how learning is experienced by young refugees, who came to Germany. This knowledge should help both educators and educationists to develop connections between those experiences and the expectations of the German education system, but also between different kinds of learning experiences (formal, informal, and non-formal). This point is particularly important when we assume that formal learning and education have been either interrupted by the flight or have never been experienced because of war and/or a disordered state. Furthermore, it will be brought out in which way race and racism work and affect adolescent learning after the arrival in Germany.

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