Tasks

The Georg Eckert Institute is an accredited and internationally connected reference center for textbook research. Its central competence lies in the application oriented research of collective patterns of interpretation, concepts of identity and representations as conveyed through national education and as such also institutionally secured. The GEI’s concentration lies in the social studies (history, geography and civic studies). The heart of the institute and its broad network is its specialty library, a foundation for comparative research that draws academics – through the support of a scholarship program – to Braunschweig from both within Germany and abroad.

The GEI operates within a research field in which various academic disciplines meet. Its pursuits move at the interface of science, educational policy and practice. GEI’s projects closely tie research, knowledge transfer and service together.

International comparative analysis of the patterns of perception, knowledge structures and competency requirements in textbooks are at the core of its research. The cognition-inducing interests of the GEI’s research deal with questions of images of the self and images of the “other” as well as inclusion and exclusion through education. In this regard, textbooks prove to be particularly relevant academic, political and educational media, singular due to their condensed and canonical character: They define not only “legitimate knowledge” and desirable competencies, but also communicate nationally and socially preferred concepts of identity.

They are therefore also a political issue and refer to the contexts in which these political issues are manufactured, used and negotiated. Textbooks can initiate or illustrate ethnic, cultural, religious or political conflicts, yet at the same time can also serve as a means of conflict resolution and compromise.

The institute’s research and transfer activities reflect the complex character of textbooks and their embedding in various social and political contexts. The GEI contributes to the deconstruction of prejudices and concepts of the enemy and develops recommendations for the objectification and advancement of instructional media. Particularly in (post-) conflict and transformation societies, it also acts as a mediator in textbook conflicts. The GEI increases awareness for the diversity of the identity concepts that are formed in schools (or should be formed in schools) and develops models for the handling of textbook-oriented conflicts.

Textbook research is a field of cross-sections, attractive and connectable to by academics from various disciplinary contexts and regions. The GEI therefore depends on and cultivates the cooperation of regionally specific and (multi-) disciplinary research. It provides an infrastructure for international textbook research, communicates and “translates” between various players in this field and contributes to the international networking of these players.

The Georg Eckert Institute will construct new competencies that allow it to unlock new research fields. Thus the institute addresses the question of what relationship textbook-conveyed interpretations and inventories of knowledge have to those concepts of identity that are offered by other educational media and players in the academic arena. In the future it will continue to be deeply engaged in the history, theory and methodology of educational media research and will include empirical research on reception, effect and evaluation in its research program.

[Research]