Open Access

Kathrin Winkler

• Education institutions in European immigration societies must struggle with a lot of challenges. About one-third of the refugees are school-age children and youth. Every third child has a migration biography and many of the refugee and displaced children and youth come from Arabic countries. They bring along their various religious affiliation and culture into secular societies formerly molded by Christianity. This situation requires a lot of special accommodations for educational institutions like schools, kindergarten, and religious communities. Besides language barriers and being mindful of their traumatic experiences, educational actors need to be sensitive in particular with intercultural and interreligious conflict situations, anti-Semitic or Islamophobic positions and radicalization tendencies of cultural and/or religious identity. The background for this topic is provided by the experiences of children and youth, who give us an insight into the clash of different religions and cultures in immigrant educational systems, into the significance of faith, the complexity of hybrid identities, but also the experience of being subaltern. That there is the importance of religious literacy for coping with the impacts of migration in educational work in schools, churches and religious communities will finally be discussed.