Cultural Appropriation of Spaces and Things

All over the world, children are confronted with an increasingly complicated and fast-moving world. Children need elementary cultural techniques and skills to shape their own lives and enable them to find individual interpretations of meaning. This proceedings volume gathers papers presented at the symposium “Cultural Appropriation of Spaces and Things” (Siegen, Germany in October 2019). In addition to the acquisition of classical cultural techniques such as arithmetic, writing and reading, the competent handling of spaces and things – through manifold processes of appropriation and reflection – is crucial. It forms the basis and prerequisite for the development of competences or abilities that are suitable for understanding the dimensions, the complexity and changeability of their world and enable them to critically deal with associated problems and find appropriate solutions. The aim of the conference was to find suitable ways for children all over the world for a methodically and didactically guided examination of their natural, social and technical environment. At the same time, the aim was to achieve a mutual enrichment of monodisciplinary research accesses. It also included a self-critical reflection of one’s own culturally shaped approaches of research.