What We Do

We concentrate our activities on six major areas of co-operation and exchange of ideas, experiences. and outcomes of research and of encounters between students, teachers and educators:

(1) exchange programmes between universities:

-Exchange of lecturers of the participating universities: University of Oldenburg and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in Port Elizabeth, who are connected by a partnership contract since 1998, as well the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) at the University of Cape Town and the Department of Political Science at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg). By teaching and research the lecturers promote aims of the Centre, especially in international and intercultural curriculum development, socio-cultural diversity education and the advancement of children and youth who are socially disadvantaged and are being discriminated because of their ‘race’.

- Exchange programmes for students from South Africa going to Oldenburg for post-graduate studies, research or internships, and for Oldenburg students going to South Africa for study phases and internships in schools and in youth and children’s centres have similar aims;

(2) exchange of teachers, especially the programme “In-service Training for Teachers of Disadvantaged Learners and Communities (INSETforTODLAC):

- teachers from township and farm schools in the Eastern Cape Province and from schools with disadvantaged learners. in Lower Saxony share professional experiences through visits and counter-visits and practice co-operative bi-regional school-based in-service training:

(3) support of partnerships between schools in the two regions, aiming at the advancement of especially disadvantaged learners, through counselling and co-operation offered by lecturers and internship students;

(4) co-operative development and implementation of bi- or multi-national (B.Ed. or M.Ed.)study courses and in-service training courses for teachers, college lecturers, educational managers, educators and social workers, especially in the fields of Health Education and Prevention of HIV/AIDS, Multilingual Education and Language Learning, Drama-and-Theatre-in-Education, Education Management, Socio-cultural Diversity/Anti-Bias Training and Human Rights Education;

(5) exchange in the field of Further Education and Training (FET) for socially disadvantaged learners and trainees involving experts, lecturers, trainers and trainees in institutions of further education and training and in training centres and units of business corporations located in the two regions;

(6) support for social and cultural education of children and youth (child-to-child peer education and theatre-in-education) in disadvantaged communities in the two regions (Lower Saxony and Eastern Cape as well as Cape Town) through study visits and internship practice of educators, artists and internship students as well as through field and action research projects.