Democratic Society and Education

Abstract

In March 2010 the Congress of the German Educational Research Association (GERA/DGfE) was held in Mainz. This year‘s topic “Bildung in der Demokratie” (Education in a Democratic Society) touched upon the classic questions and concerns of processes of learning in the domain of the social sciences, i.e. social, economic or political subjects. Therefore, in these conference proceedings we intend to present the research-trends and theoretical profiles that should be of interest especially for teaching the social sciences. Three major trends in the discipline were represented at the conference with their rather different understandings of education in social sciences: knowledge-oriented subject matter didactics, socially-oriented “Demokratiedidaktik” (didactics of democracy), and a systemic and function-oriented sociology of education. Unfortunately, dialogue between these trends was rare at Mainz. The congress proceedings will thus try to show the different approaches they take and to reconstruct the communication that was needed, but often absent. A conceptual and empirical linkage between these positions seems necessary and reasonable. The following report presents a number of research-projects which attempt such linkages and thereby reconstruct and constructively orient the inner logic of pedagogical processes along the road to an empirically founded theory of education.