Every theory of education endorses an image of a human being as someone who can be educated and is capable of self-education and self-cultivation. Since J.F. Herbart, educationalists have been sketching this image under the title "Bildsamkeit," which has become a central element of the specific German way of speaking about educational…

Inside the action learning community there are many very open accounts and considerations of specific challenges and general phenomena such as power, emotion, action and learning. 'Am I doing it right' (Pedler and Abbott 2008 ["Am I Doing it Right? Facilitating Action Learning for Service Improvement." "Leadership in Health…

To facilitate a more affirming classroom, this article highlights the implementation of culturally relevant and critical pedagogies of language learning to address issues related to social awareness in the language classroom. By appealing to cultural backgrounds of students and cultural backgrounds of diverse German-speaking populations, students…

Klaus Mollenhauer (1928-1998) is one of the most important German theorists of education in the postwar era. Mollenhauer is often remembered in Germany today for his first book titled "Education and Emancipation: Polemical Sketches," but he received international renown for his final monograph, "Forgotten Connections: On Culture and…

Context: The train of thoughts in this contribution is situated in the VET teacher training on an academic level, as it is usual in Germany. Key issue is the pedagogical qualification of the VET teachers and the question of how to give them possibilities to reflect their own biography, their interdependences to the actual cultural and economic…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to arrest an ongoing didactisation of teaching leading to the disappearance of the original content of knowledge. Design/methodology/approach: Teaching can only be understood within its inner logic by exploring the individual expression of pedagogical practice in three dimensions: education, formation…

This article addresses the ways in which education systems responded to the aftermath of World War I with respect to education for nationalism and internationalism. It does so by drawing on theories of internationalism and through an analysis of the writings of Daniel Prescott, an American scholar who toured European schools in the middle of the…

The article discusses the challenges and the potential approaches of competence-based programmes for higher education institutions, starting at their inception in the Bologna process. It focuses particularly on curriculum transformation and implementation of action-orientated learning concepts. Consequently, the article takes stock of recent…

Politics is inseparable from conflict. But we often have the idea that the political process has to simply "solve" conflicts and in so doing make the conflict disappear. And because the politicians are not able to do this and instead simply continue arguing, we get the impression that we have incompetent politicians, whom we cannot…

Children face increased demands for interpersonal as well as learning-related social skills, especially by the vulnerable stage of school entry, due to the more structured setting, new academic requirements, and the fact that children are supposed to interact successfully within a larger and heterogeneous peer group. Although a plethora of…

Germany has only recently started to discuss the possible contribution, on a conceptual basis, of post-colonial theory to development education. Drawing on key policy papers, this article explores how post-colonial and antiracist critiques of German development education have changed the field in the past decade. It first provides the history of…

In this paper, we explicate individual training decisions. For this purpose, we propose a framework based on instrumentality theory, a psychological theory of motivation that has frequently been applied to individual occupational behavior. To test this framework, we employ novel German individual data and estimate the effect of subjective expected…

Different conceptualizations exist about the components of the knowledge teachers need to teach mathematics with professional consciousness, and a researcher needs to describe and assess that knowledge. The fact, however, is that different conceptualizations respond to different needs, and thus, the variety is even a chance to develop the field…

Global learning facilitators from civil society organizations (CSOs) design and enrich educational processes in formal and non-formal educational settings. They need to be empowered through adequate training opportunities in global learning (GL) contexts. The project Facilitating Global Learning--Key Competences from Members of European CSOs (FGL)…

The debate concerning the relation of the theory of education and the practice of education is not new. In Germany, these discussions are an integral part of the development of educational science in the eighteenth century which is closely connected to Johann Friedrich Herbart and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Their concepts illustrate different…