300133 Education and Inequality: A Cross-National View (Parallel Seminar at the University of Haifa and Bielefeld University) (S) (WiSe 2016/2017)

The seminar aims at understanding the changing role of education in the globalization era. The emphasis will be on how educational theories and research understand the role of schooling in building (new) forms of citizenship and in reproducing inequalities. The modules will include: (a) the traditional role of the modern educational system; (b) classical sociological paradigms on education and its role in reproducing (c) ethnic inequalities; (d) gender inequalities; and the formation of (e) conceptions of social justice; (f) conclusions and discussion.
Classes will take place on a weekly basis and include all students registered in the seminar. There is an overlapping time where both classes are held in Haifa and Bielefeld at the same time. Via video-conference we will have a virtual class room with both classes. These sessions will be supplemented by tutorials in the form of small discussion groups and interchange between Israeli and German students (video-conferences). The above components of the seminar, the lectures and the tutorials, are inter-related and inter-dependent – a strategy conducive to intercultural exchange. The tutorials will be devoted to practical implementations of the theories, notions and terms studied in the lectures. In the tutorials there are short presentations from Israeli and German students where the situation in the own country is described – starting from basic information on the structure of the educational system to empirical results related to the theoretical topics discussed in the class.