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The Professorship General Educational Sciences

The most important tasks carried out within General Educational Sciences include on the one hand thinking critically about education and about its tasks, concepts and objectives in order to develop an educational theory. A second task is to record the conditions, the progression and the effects of educational processes in an empirical manner.

The objective is to make the reflections and concepts of theoretical educational sciences fruitful for empirical research and at the same time find approaches which make empirical educational research more able to make connections to theoretical discussions in educational sciences.

One way of combining educational theory with educational research is qualitative educational research. This includes approaches which not only highlight the subjective perspective of the self-educating but which also develop “hyper-individual” process and influence structures in the educational histories of the individuals. In order to depict educational processes in a comprehensive manner, processes are also used which combine qualitative and quantitative methods based

on triangulating, integrative or mixed methods. The objective is to combine central questions: What is education” and “How is education” – including the social structure and context conditions – “possible”, but also: “What can block education?” A requirement for the implementation of this binding task is that general educational sciences highlights openness to interdisciplinary and international impacts and the plurality of its concepts, thereby opening up a broad theoretical and research field. This basic understanding – the combination of theory and research, method pluralism, interdisciplinarity and internationality – is implemented in various content areas:

1) childhood and youth research. Research within educational sciences into childhood and youth which focuses on the emancipatory dimension of childhood and youth and issues of the subjective handling and design options and limitations in adolescents. In this context, education and educational processes play an important role, as do the conditions in which a person grows up and social inequality during childhood and youth. At the same time, there is also a focus on the social situation of childhood and youth and the institutions of this and on the experience, thoughts and actions of the child or adolescent (in particular in biographical research).

In this context, a number of representative studies on children and young people have been carried out in the past few years (most recently the Panorama study “Appsolutely smart. Young Lives”), which looked at the areas of school and education, conditions in which a child grows up within a family, practices in youth culture, options to participate, competency requirements in the leisure and media field and in the field of cultural identity and integration etc.

Research on childhood and youth from an educational sciences perspective looks at prevention, intervention, removal of social disparities, improvement of the conditions in which a child lives and grows up. In this field, a research project is currently being carried out on the experience of young people with sexual violence. The objective is in addition to the prevalence and the possible backgrounds of sexual violence, to provide practical knowledge in the sense of an educational prevention programme both within the framework of school-based and extracurricular work. For further Information, go to http://www.speak-studie.de/

2) A second content-based reference point is the Research into transformative educational processes (following Nohl, Rosenberg & Thomsen (2015), Koller (2009, 2010), Marotzki (1990), Koller, Marotzki & Sanders (2007); for more information on this at an international level see also the approach of Transformative Learning (Kasworm & Bowles 2012), which is based on various phases of life. Key to this is the issue of the possibility of changing habits through education.

For a long time, education was understood as a purely intellectual cognitive process; the approach used here focuses more on the situational, performative and physical aspects. A completed research project in this area is based on (study) decisions and coping strategies when transitioning from school to study (comparative analysis of educational processes in the transition of student teachers whose main subject is art or physics cover). Under the umbrella of documentary methods, it is primarily triangulating methods such as biographical interviews and photo staging which are used.

This area of research is being expanded to include various biographical transitions in further projects. A project that was recently launched looks at “Educational processes of women in middle age during the transition ‘(last) child moving out of the family home’ - an interview and photo analysis”. Click here for further information.

INKref, another project (commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as a joint project between the University of Gießen (educational research, remedial education and special education) and the University of Marburg (general educational sciences)), aims to develop an inclusive attitude within (university) education. An educational theory basis is key to our concept. On the basis of the theory of habit, we are looking at the question of how transformative learning and educational processes, in other words those which change habits, are possible when studying. There are two elements that are necessary from our perspective: the teaching content – here: the various aspects of an inclusive attitude – must be able to be connected to a person’s own biographical experience and the habitual core believes must be “put under pressure” (Maschke). Only when both of these requirements have been met can transformative learning and educational processes be triggered which are able to initiate fundamental changes in the “relationship between the self and the world” (Marotzki, 1990). Further questions in this context look at the cultural and aesthetic practices of young people and also use qualitative and/or quantitative data to investigate the habit of “unlocking” occasions in youth culture scenes and forms of expression or look at the issue of unexpected educational pathways or the significance of biographical failure as an impulse for education.
3) A third focus is on the expansion of research into childhood and youth within educational research to include lifelong learning and education, formal and informal educational contexts and extracurricular educational activities. In this area, an international social modernisation process can be observed. A development is able to be identified at an international level which is changing the activity environment in the field of education. The overarching term for all the various designations (after school programmes, designed activities etc.) is “extended education”.

Until recently, there was a lack of comparative research projects and above all continuous academic exchange on this relatively new area of educational research at an international level. In order to improve this situation, an international research network on extended education (Network for Extracurricular and Out-of-School Time Educational Research – NEO-ER) was established in November 2010 with the support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The fourth network meeting took place in Seoul in April 2016 (PHOTO of this?). Among other things, the following were presented (Sabine Maschke together with Stephan Kielblock and Ludwig Stecher) “The Perspectives On Extracurricular Activities Which Have Gone Unnoticed So Far: Physical and Psychological Safety” (for further reading[1]; the article will appear in the next edition of IJREE).

With the support of the German Research Foundation, the International Journal for Research on Extended Education (IJREE; see www.ijree.com) was founded in 2013. Within the scope of this professorship, the aspect of safety in all-day schools is taken into account, and in this context in particular peer-to-peer sexual violence.  The next important step to strengthen educational research in the field of extended education is the targeted support of early stage researchers. From 28 November to 1 December 2016 there therefore will be an international workshop on empirical educational research in the field of extended education at the Philipp University of Marburg. The workshop, a request for proposals for which was put out across Germany, is aimed at doctoral candidates with a research focus on extracurricular educational research (extended education). Leading international experts from the field of extended education research will report on the latest developments in this field of research during this workshop and be available to the doctoral candidates as contacts for their dissertation projects. The workshop is being organised by Sabine Maschke, Ludwig Stecher and Ivo Züchner.