Migration phenomena challenge, unsettle, and disrupt the legitimacy and functionality of the natio-racial-culturally coded 'us' in nation states like Germany. As a result, the legitimacy and functionality of institutional routines such as linguistic practices or practices of collective memory are questioned. Thus migration as the movement of people across borders as well as a discourse that shapes new knowledge about belonging and citizenship troubles culturally dominant views and opinions about the legitimacy and functionality of individual privileges – like the privilege to not only expect but to claim that one's own language is also the language of the other. Against the backdrop of the understanding of migration as both bodily and discursive influential, it becomes clear that pedagogy has to deal with the conditions, forms, and consequences of movements of people across borders. In our approach of “Pedagogical Professionalism in a Migration Society”, pedagogy comes into being as an important field in the critical discourses on migration and discourses on legitimate and less legitimate forms of belonging. So in the context of the overall project we ask what happens when migration becomes an issue in educational fields and to what extent pedagogical protagonists and institutions weaken or strengthen natio-racial-culturally coded concepts of 'us' and 'them'. Thus education and pedagogy act both as a mirror and a playground for those symbolic practices that differentiate between a natio-racial-culturally coded 'us' and 'them'.

This perspective is central to the project “Pedagogical Professionalism in a Migration Society” of the University of Bremen and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, which encompasses three project phases: