Bridging among Ethnic Communities by Cross-cultural Communities of Practice

The integration of immigrants is a big challenge for western societies. In this paper we describe how to bridge between ethnically defined communities by means of computer-supported project work. Our approach is grounded in socio-cultural theories of learning, especially Community of Practice (CoP). To evaluate our approach, we have built up a computer club in a multi cultural neighbourhood of the city of Bonn. Parents and children of mainly German and Turkish origin work jointly to create multimedia artefacts. These artefacts represent aspects of the neighbourhood’s recent history. The paper describes the project and its theoretical background. We also provide empirical findings to evaluate our approach.