In recent years, border regions in Germany have increasingly attracted scholarly attention in educational research (Budde et al., forthcoming; Perlinger & Wischmann, 2025). This growing interest is evident both in debates on transnational European education in the context of school and curriculum development (Busch et al., 2025) and in linguistic research on multilingualism, language practices, and language policies in border contexts (Höder & Krämer, 2025). Borders and border regions are thus no longer merely treated as peripheral spaces, but as dynamic social and educational arenas in which migration, mobility, and transnationality intersect in specific ways (Gerrard & Sriprakash, 2018). The proximity to national borders can be framed as a pedagogical resource that enables cross-border cooperation, multilingual education, and European citizenship education. However, less attention has been paid to how such border proximity is interpreted, valued, and enacted in everyday school practice by teachers in border regions themselves (Rosen, forthcoming). This paper addresses this gap by focusing on schools located in the Franco-German border region and by examining teachers’ biographical perspectives on the relevance of the border (region) in their professional practice.

The guiding research question is: How is the Franco-German border region narratively made relevant—or rendered invisible—by teachers when reflecting on their everyday school practice, and what does this reveal about the possible formation of transnational(ised) educational spaces?

Conceptually, the paper draws on perspectives from transnational studies, also known as cross-border studies (Levitt & Khagram, 2008; Amelina et al., 2012), and migration studies in education (Gogolin & Pries, 2004). These perspectives typically aim to overcome the methodological nationalism inherent in educational research (Dale & Robertson, 2009) and to denaturalize the idea that school/ing in the context of globalisation and cross-border mobility can still be exclusively understood in a national frame. Schools and schooling in border regions appear as obvious choices for such denaturalizing work inspired from broader migration studies (see Wimmer & Glick-Schiller, 2002). However, they are not to be understood as naturally transnational spaces simply because they are located in an area where border-crossings are a quasi-natural feature of social life. Instead, they are seen as socially and institutionally produced educational spaces whose relevance in relation to the border (crossing) depends primarily on in situ actors’ interpretations and practices (see also Kesper-Biermann, 2016, p. 93). The “transnationality” of educational spaces is not taken for granted or attributed from above, but becomes an empirical question. Its answer will depend on how, and in relation to what units and levels of analysis, “the transnational” is defined in the first place (Szakacs-Behling, 2022). In contrast to original conceptualisations of “transnational educational spaces” that consider only private cross-border educational offers (such as IB schools, or schools abroad) as genuinely “transnational” (e.g. Adick, 2018; Hornberg, 2014), we turn our analytical gaze to public schools located in a border region and examine them through a transnational lens. Beyond their organisational, structural and financial aspects (meso-level), we focus instead on the micro-level of interactions and investigate how participants in the everyday of schooling make sense of practices, symbols and artefacts making up the transnational social spaces opened by the border region (Pries, 2008) and thereby we fill the existing gaps in the literature on transnational education spaces with an emic perspective, emerging from the participants in social life themselves (Szakacs-Behling, forthcoming).  

By focusing on teachers’ biographical sense-making, the paper highlights how transnational educational spaces—understood in their emic sense—are actively constructed, relativized, or selectively activated within schools, thereby contributing to ongoing debates on internationalization, social justice, and educational inequality in European border contexts.

This ongoing study is based on a qualitative research design employing biographical-narrative interviews with teachers (Rosenthal, 2015). This approach is particularly suited to exploring how teachers make sense of their professional experiences and how past trajectories shape present interpretations of educational contexts. The sample consists so far of two former German teachers who worked abroad and are now employed at two secondary schools in the Franco-German border region. Their transnational professional biographies provide a rich empirical basis for examining constructions of border relevance. The interviews were conducted using an open narrative prompt in 2024, inviting participants to reflect on their professional pathways and their experiences of teaching in different national and institutional contexts. Follow-up questions addressed the perceived role of the Franco-German border in everyday school practice, including curricular decisions, school cooperation, and student engagement. Data analysis follows principles of reconstructive qualitative analysis, informed by constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014). The interviews were transcribed and coded iteratively, combining open, focused, and comparative coding. Particular attention was paid to how teachers frame the border region: whether it appears as irrelevant, latent, strategically mobilized, or normatively charged. Analytical memos were used to reflect on emerging categories and to critically examine how transnationality, internationalization, and inequality are discursively linked in the material.

The paper demonstrates that schools in border regions cannot be assumed to function automatically as transnational educational spaces. Instead, the relevance of the Franco-German border is actively constructed by teachers and varies significantly across narratives. While one teacher marginalizes the border in favor of broader internationalization frameworks, the other actively mobilize it as a school resource—yet often in selective and exclusionary ways. By highlighting these ambivalences, the study contributes to a more differentiated understanding of education in border regions – which may, or may not, result in transnational (educational) spaces, as we have conceptualised them. It shows how educational opportunities linked to border proximity may simultaneously enable international learning and reproduce social inequalities. The findings invite a critical reflection on how schools conceptualize and govern transnationality and/or transnational connections and raise questions about who is granted access to cross-border educational resources. The paper thus contributes to ECER debates on internationalisation, migration, and social justice by foregrounding the micropolitics of transnational educational spaces and by emphasizing the role of teachers’ interpretations in shaping inclusive—or exclusive—border pedagogies.

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