University of Klagenfurt, Faculty of Educational Science and School Research

At the Klagenfurt site, vignette research is being tested in social spaces beyond the school. Thus, vignettes are created in public places and train stations, in buses and trains, at road crossings, playgrounds, parks or assembly halls, inspired by Martha Muchow's pioneering exploration of urban and communal living environments. Due to the often complete anonymity of the persons depicted in such vignettes, the interpretation is forced to be free of any knowledge of their past history and focuses on attempts to understand movements in public space as an expression of - more or less given - appropriation, empowerment, inclusion and participation of people in their daily life. In the reading, this serves to reflect on social orders, mutual conditionality, hierarchies and inequalities along different lines of difference such as gender, language, age, origin, habitus, milieu and disability. Of particular interest are processes of (personal and social) learning in relation to the coexistence of people in heterogeneous societies, which are also characterized by migration.

The Institute for Educational Science and Research is involved in the training of teachers in the field of educational science fundamentals. Research on learning in schools thus also focuses primarily on social interactions, negotiation processes, strategies and power relations between students, teachers, school administrators, and political and social orders. Teaching-learning methods, lesson design, school culture and educational programs are included and reflected on possible - open and hidden - attitudes, curricula, hierarchies and diversity phenomena. In the work with students, vignettes serve to practice looking, listening and empathy as possibilities for bodily-sensual perception and co-experience instead of a mostly hasty (judgmental) categorization and diagnostic classification.

At IFEB, vignettes are used in various projects, for example in the current focus on socio-spatially oriented life-world research, in the accompaniment of project classes with young people who have fled ("Learning between flight and arrival") and of a student parliament ("Living and learning democracy"). The work with anecdotes is planned in the project "Be First", which was approved at the end of 2019 by the Jubilee Fund of the Austrian National Bank on educational pathways and educational inheritance, in order to reflect decisions of pupils for or against university studies also in the perspective of more distant and/or lasting experiences. The researchers at the University of Klagenfurt are concerned to test combinations of methods such as the combination of vignettes with impromptu narratives and the phenomenological interpretation of interviews. A special focus is the use of vignettes and anecdotes to perceive possible learning experiences that are produced by performative methods, for example through forum theater, gestalt therapeutic group self-experiences ("Hero*internal journey"), rap workshops with young people and intuitive drawing.

Within the framework of the project "INCREASE", teaching-learning experiences are used for a joint reflection process on the basis of vignettes in order to test changes in the academic and non-academic sector.

In the framework of the EU project ProLernen, a team of experts in inclusion and diversity at IFEB was working - from November 2020 to November 2022 - on the development of a manual for the training of a professional pedagogical habitus based on the vignette methodology. Furthermore, training modules for future educators and educational managers were developed.