Saarland University and University of Warsaw are building on their collaboration within the DAAD Eastern Partnership Programme to conduct a Polish-German study on the integration of Ukrainian refugee children.
Text by Dr. Ekaterina Klüh, Coordinator of the Eastern European Programs at the International Office of Saarland University.
Saarland University and the University of Warsaw celebrated the 40th anniversary of their cooperation in 2023. This partnership was institutionally formalized at the university level in 1983 through a bilateral agreement. Since 1984, the cooperation has been continuously supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) within the framework of the “Eastern Partnerships” programme, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. The collaboration is distinguished by its successful implementation across several generations of academic actors and thus represents an outstanding example of sustainable international higher education cooperation. This long-term success has been significantly facilitated by the comprehensive and flexible funding framework of the “Eastern Partnerships” programme.
The project Integration Policies in Poland and Germany for Young Ukrainian Migrants: Linguistic and Cultural Dimensions (Leads: Prof. Dr. Magdalena Olpińska-Szkiełko, University of Warsaw, and Prof. Dr. Stefanie Haberzettl, Saarland University) forms part of the planned cooperation for the period 2027–2029. It envisages seminars and workshops dedicated to academic exchange, as well as mobility programmes for students and researchers. The project focuses on pupils and students and examines practices related to language acquisition, cultural adaptation, and social participation, with the aim of generating evidence-based impulses for the further development of integration policies.
The DAAD Funding Programme “Eastern Partnerships”
For the diverse range of cooperation between German higher education institutions and partner institutions in our eastern neighboring regions, the DAAD has been providing flexible support for more than 50 years through the programme “Partnerships with higher education institutions in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe, as well as the South Caucasus and Central Asia”, with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office.
The programme is announced annually for funding periods of three years each and supports reciprocal exchanges among students, lecturers, researchers, and even administrative staff from German higher education institutions and their partner institutions in the target region. In doing so, it makes a significant contribution to the development and expansion of subject-specific and regional expertise, as well as to international teaching and research cooperation.
Currently, more than 60 German higher education institutions receive funding through the Eastern Partnerships programme. The projects cover a wide range of topics, formats, and target groups. Some have been developing for decades thanks to the programme, while others were only admitted to funding this year.
This month, three Eastern Partnership projects focusing on cooperation with Polish or Ukrainian universities offer insights into their work in very different ways.
The large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered one of the largest forced migration movements in Europe in recent history. Millions of people were displaced, with women and school-age children making up the majority of those seeking protection. This unprecedented situation has placed significant social, cultural, and educational demands on European host countries, which have had to respond quickly to the needs of newly arrived Ukrainian migrants while simultaneously promoting their integration and preserving their linguistic and cultural identity.


Left to right: Veronica, age 6 (Warsaw); Yaroslava, age 11 (Tbilisi).
Since the start of the war, Germany and Poland have been among the most important destination countries for Ukrainian refugees. In February 2026, Poland was hosting approximately 1 million Ukrainians with valid residency status, while Germany had taken in more than 1.3 million refugees by the end of 2025. These figures illustrate not only the scale of the displacement but also its profound impact on national education systems. Schools were among the first institutions to respond: many Ukrainian children were already integrated into local classrooms as early as March 2022. In Poland alone, over 195,000 Ukrainian students were enrolled in the education system during the 2024–25 school year. This rapid integration created both opportunities and challenges, requiring the children to adapt to new linguistic and educational environments while maintaining the continuity of their linguistic and cultural development.
Against this backdrop, the project Integration Policies in Poland and Germany for Young Ukrainian Immigrants: Linguistic and Cultural Dimensions was launched as a joint initiative of the University of Warsaw and Saarland University. The project focuses on the comparative analysis of integration policies in countries that have received the largest number of Ukrainian migrants since the outbreak of the war. Particular attention is paid to the education sector, including language learning (Polish and German) and the processes of cultural adaptation within the host societies.
In a practical project at the Chair of German as a Foreign and Second Language at Saarland University, “DaZ-Coaches UA,” since spring 2022, in close collaboration with a school that had taken in a particularly large number of children and adolescents from Ukraine, the emerging “opportunities and challenges” of rapid integration for new classmates who still lacked German language skills could be observed in real time, so to speak. Student teachers in a wide variety of subjects served as assistants to the German as a Second Language teacher. They also acted as a kind of tutor for the new arrivals and provided opportunities for communication during shared leisure activities. Other volunteer initiatives seeking to help refugees from Ukraine were also supported by the department with its expertise in language acquisition and multilingualism.

“DaZ-Coaches UA” did not receive formal academic support in the strict sense. The project presented in this blog post is now intended to address this gap. Its central research question is: How were institutional approaches to supporting the integration of young migrants in Poland and Germany designed and implemented? The study examines education-related and social mechanisms that support language acquisition, cultural adaptation, and participation in school life, with the aim of identifying both the strengths and limitations of existing integration models and highlighting transferable best practices.
This project builds on research initiated in November 2023 at the University of Warsaw under the title My Multilingual World. It emerged in response to concerns regarding the potential linguistic, educational, and emotional challenges Ukrainian children face in adapting to new sociocultural environments following forced migration. In the first phase, the study focused on the children’s drawings as a methodological tool to gain access to their perceptions of multilingualism and their everyday life experiences. The resulting corpus of 40 drawings provided insights into how the children understand and relate to the languages and cultural diversity in their environment. A generally positive or neutral attitude toward multilingualism emerged, with the children integrating Ukrainian, Russian, and the new language, Polish, as part of a broader and functional language repertoire. Rather than pointing to identity conflicts or linguistic tensions, the results suggested that multilingualism is often perceived as a natural and integrated aspect of their living environment. At the same time, these initial findings underscored the need for a more in-depth and systematic investigation, as the drawings did not fully capture the complexity of their language awareness, emotional attachments, or evolving attitudes.
In later phases, the research went beyond drawings to include portrait-based tasks and additional qualitative methods to more explicitly capture the children’s linguistic self-perception and their emotional relationship to the languages in their repertoire. Particular attention was paid to their self-perception as multilingual individuals, their attitudes toward Ukrainian, Russian, and the other languages, as well as the ways in which these attitudes are shaped by family experiences, schooling, and broader sociopolitical contexts. In parallel, the scope of the study was expanded through the implementation of the Draw: My Multilingual World project in Tbilisi, which was carried out in collaboration with the Georgian International University (GIU).


Left to right: Artur, age 12 (Warsaw); Sofija, age 11 (Warsaw).
The project was further developed through planned collaborations with additional international partners, including Georgian International University, Palacký University Olomouc, and institutions in Germany such as Saarland University in Saarbrücken and the University of Hildesheim. These collaborations enable the expansion of research to various contexts in the host countries and open up comparative perspectives on the integration of Ukrainian children into different educational systems.
In summary, the project underscores the importance of supporting multilingual children in preserving their linguistic and cultural identities while simultaneously fostering their integration into new educational and social environments. The findings to date suggest that Ukrainian children in Poland and Germany actively engage with their multilingual reality and often demonstrate an adaptable and positive attitude toward linguistic diversity. However, they also underscore the need for further research into the long-term development of these attitudes, particularly regarding the preservation of the language of origin, emotional attachment to different languages, and the evolving role of family and institutional language policies. By combining insights from the fields of education, sociolinguistics, and migration research, this project aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of multilingualism in the context of forced migration and to serve as a foundation for future education and integration policies across Europe.
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The views and opinions expressed in the blog posts are solely those of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Entanglements. Polish and Ukrainian Studies blog or its team. The authors of the texts bear full responsibility for the accuracy of the facts presented in the publications and the correctness of the quotations.








