‘Tracksuit Traitors’: Eastern German Top Athletes on the Run

In the time between its founding and the fall of the wall in November 1989, more than three million people left the German Democratic Republic, many of them illegally and under dangerous circumstances. The party leadership perceived this mass exodus of its citizens as one of the major threats for the real socialist regime.1^?1. Bispinck Bispinck, Henrick. “Republikflucht. Flucht und Ausreise als Problem der DDR-Führung.” Vor dem Mauerbau. Politik und Gesellschaft der DDR in den Fünfziger Jahren, edited by MichaelSchwartz and Hermann Wentker, 285–309. München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2003. [Google Scholar], “Republikflucht.”‘Republikflucht’, as this move from East to West was called by the party leadership, was the reason for the two most important hiatuses in Eastern German history: the first result was that the SED leadership built the wall in August 1961. Many years later, in the fall of 1989, the situation culminated, when a flood of desperate refugees tried to escape to the Federal Republic of Germany via Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, thus effectively hurrying along the regime's demise. The world of sports, too, was considerably affected by this phenomenon. The following essay shall offer a short historical summary of the different reasons and routes Eastern German top athletes chose for their escape. Examples from various decades show that in spite of individual circumstances certain similarities in pattern can be made out, especially in respect to the way the government dealt with these cases of ‘treason’.     

La promotion de la mobilité dans les sciences de l'ingénieur en France et en Allemagne

Selon la Loi-cadre de l'enseignement supérieur de la République Fédérale d'Allemagne, les universités doivent encourager la coopération universitaire internationale, et notamment européenne, ainsi que les échanges entre les universités allemandes et étrangères.     

College choice in the church-affiliated sector of higher education: The influence of congregational cultural orientation

The relationship between a Midwest church-affiliated institution and its supporting congregations provides an opportunity to investigate part of the sociological environment within which a college-choice decision is made for students of a strong denominational orientation. Applying the local-cosmopolitan dichotomy used by previous researchers, this study hypothesized that the cultural orientation of local congregational leaders reflects norms that are aligned to congregational enrollment support or nonsupport for the denominational university. The findings demonstrate that the concepts of cultural, social, and ecclesiological localism-cosmopolitanism are helpful in explaining an individual's support for the denominational university. Also, differing cultural orientations among congregational leaders are related to the degree to which the congregation supports the university with the enrollment of youth.     

Combined updating on science and pedagogy for experienced teachers

This paper describes the structure and unique features of an inservice training course for science teachers (Pädagogik und Fachdidaktik für Lehrer, PFL). The course is based on the view that most issues of classroom practice are at the same time issues of pedagogy, methodology and subject knowledge. Therefore, the close connection between the participants' work required during the course and their teaching situation is most important: the teachers selected issues of direct concern to their daily work, performed research on these issues by methods of action research, analysed their findings, took appropriate action and documented the process in written form. They were supported by a team of mentors. A preliminary evaluation indicates a high degree of satisfaction of the participants and provides suggestions for the improvement of initial teacher education. In the PFL-project inservice science teacher education is considered not only an opportunity for professional development of individual teachers, but also a contribution to the development of science education and—in a larger context—school development.     

An Experiment in Multinational Collaborative Learning and Group Work Using the Internet

In this paper we describe a pedagogic experiment, intended to support and encourage interactive group discussion among students from different universities, in different countries, in what we call Internet Seminars. In an Internet Seminar students and teachers cooperate via the Internet to research and discuss a common subject. In the case discussed here, the chosen subject, 'Teleworking' was selected as one which would have particular resonance with the medium of the seminar, and also as being a topic which is not, as yet, part of the mainstream teaching curriculum. The aims of the seminar, however, were not only or even primarily concerned with the subject material. We also hoped to encourage and help the students develop the transferable skills of project planning, research, team-working and communication, with the added stimulus of working in a multinational context. We describe the form of the seminar, report on its outcomes, and comment on the successes and failures of our approach. © 1999 IFIP, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers     

Technical problem solving among 10-year-old students as related to science achievement,out-of-school experience,domain-specific control beliefs,and attribution patterns

Using a sample of 531 10-year-olds from Germany and the United States, the study investigated the relationships among the structure of everyday experience, domain-specific control beliefs, acquisition of science knowledge, and solving of everyday technical problems. It assumed that children acquire operative schemata through daily experiences with technical objects and toys which not only transfer to solving technical everyday problems but also have a positive influence on school science learning. It was also thought that the covariation between technical everyday experiences and science achievement/technical problem solving would be mediated by control beliefs. A causal model, developed and tested by means of structural equation modeling, showed that domain-specific out-of-school experience only indirectly influences problem-solving performance, mediated by control beliefs. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 987–1013, 1998.