Chair for General Education

Prof. Dr. Christian Grabau

Welcome to the website of the Department of General Education!

Our research and teaching is characterized by the fact that we ourselves make the theories and concepts with which the discipline operates our subject matter. Theories are never innocent: they determine how we look at the world, at ourselves and at others. They pave the way for how we interpret pedagogical phenomena and how we act in pedagogical contexts.

In both teaching and research, we are therefore primarily concerned with raising awareness of the power of theories and their concepts and showing that there are always several ways of interpreting reality. At the same time, however, we also want to draw attention to the opportunities that theories offer. Precisely because pedagogical phenomena are so familiar to us, we can use theories to distance ourselves from our own prejudices and experiences and in this way explore new possibilities.

Our starting point here are social transformation processes and global challenges (climate crisis and social justice, technologization and digitalization, etc.) that call for different answers, including from educational science. The question of what kind of education we want cannot be separated from the question of how we want to live. This is why we are trying to turn our attention to theories, concepts and approaches that are not part of the familiar educational science canon - and which once again expand the scope for thinking about education and shaping educational processes and institutions.