The Schülercampus, a campus workshop for pupils, entitled “More Migrants as Teachers” will now also take place in Bremen. This orientation seminar on teacher training and teaching careers is aimed at school pupils with migrant backgrounds. It will be hosted by the University of Bremen from 26th till 29th March 2011. Registration begins mid-December 2010. The Schülercampus in Bremen is an initiative of the ZEIT Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius, run in cooperation with the Bremen Senator for Education and Science and the University of Bremen.
The project addresses a fundamental problem experienced by schools in Germany: Whereas today nearly every third pupil has a non-German background – in some inner-city schools the proportion is over 60 percent, in many classes even as much as 90 percent – in contrast, teachers with migrant backgrounds are the absolute exception: only 1 percent of all teachers in Germany come from migrant families. Currently the proportion studying to become teachers is around 2 percent.
The four-day compact seminar Schülercampus presents Bremen pupils with migrant backgrounds with an opportunity to experience what university life can be like and gives them an authentic insight into teacher training and teaching careers. The objective is to awaken interest in working as a teacher and to learn how to prepare for university studies in teacher training. The workshop is open to all pupils with migrant backgrounds attending schools in Bremen or Bremerhaven and who will be taking their final school exams, the Abitur, in 2011 or 2012. Additional information (in German) can be obtained at www.uni-bremen.de/schuelercampus or www.mehr-migranten-werden-lehrer.de.
The Bremen Senator for Education, Renate Jürgens-Pieper, praised the initiative of the ZEIT Foundation: “I am pleased that Bremen will also be able to benefit from the ZEIT Foundation’s initiative ‘More Migrants as Teachers’ and that a Schülercampus will take place at the University of Bremen. Training more students with migrant backgrounds to become teachers in German schools will make it possible to do more for the children and young people in our multi-ethnic society.”
This unique orientation workshop was first offered in Hamburg in 2008 – together with the Hamburg institute for teacher training and pupil development [Landesinstitut für Lehrerbildung und Schulentwicklung] and the Center for Teacher Training [Zentrum für Lehrerbildung]. The Schülercampus has already had an enormous impact: of the 121 attendees of the Schülercampus seminars which took place in Hamburg and Düsseldorf, 90 have subsequently taken up university studies – and of this number, a full two thirds have chosen teacher training.
