Outstanding Research into Educational Media

This year Dr Tina van der Vlies will be honoured with the Georg Eckert Research Award for her dissertation ‘Echoing Events. The Perpetuation of National Narratives in English and Dutch History Textbooks, 1920-2010’. In her doctoral thesis, submitted to the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2019, Dr van der Vlies examined 225 English and Dutch history books published between 1920 and 2010. She was able to convincingly demonstrate that national narratives are perpetuated in history books through recurring ways of interpretation and patterns of reference.

Julian Broll will be awarded the Georg Eckert Award for Young Academics for his master’s thesis ‘Unser neues Fach - Konstruktion von gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Integrationsfächern – eine theoretische Annäherung und empirische Beobachtungen am Beispiel von Schulbüchern für ‚Gesellschaftslehre‘ in Niedersachsen’ (Our new subject - constructions of social science integration subjects – a theoretical approach and empirical observation using social science textbooks in Lower Saxony as an example), in which he explored the challenges and possibilities of these new subjects and addressed a highly topical theme in education policy discourse in Germany.

‘Thanks to the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute, Lower Saxony is in a position to bring university teaching, educational research and the reality in schools ever closer together and to incorporate current insights into the development of curricula’, said Lower Saxony’s minister for science and culture, Falko Mohrs. ‘Comparative textbook research provides important stimuli when addressing the past. The findings from this field are essential for political education and the further development of educational media. Textbooks are the leading media for upcoming generations. The Georg Eckert Research Award shines a light on this research’.

‘Braunschweig’s significance as a research region is internationally recognised. In the field of educational media, the GEI lends a particular prestige to the city, as demonstrated by the international submissions received by the jury for the Georg Eckert Research Award’ said Eckhardt Fuchs, director of the GEI, ‘The award highlights that in addition to technical and natural sciences, the region also offers outstanding research work in the humanities and social sciences’.

‘The Georg Eckert Research Award recognises outstanding academic work in the field of educational media research. The findings from such work benefit educational media providers such as Westermann, as the research provides valuable stimuli for the development and improvement of teaching materials. Within our long-standing and constructive collaboration with the Georg Eckert Institute the Westermann Group is honoured and delighted to have been able to support this award for many years, said Andrea Watermeyer, head of the Westermann educational media section in the Westermann Group.

About the Winners

Dr Tina van der Vlies has been an assistant professor at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication at the Erasmus University Rotterdam since 2021. She attained her bachelor’s degree in history from Rotterdam in 2008 and then completed two master’s degrees in the history of society and education respectively. Dr van der Vlies undertook several research trips during work on her thesis, during one of which she visited the GEI. She has received several awards for her research, including two for her dissertation.

Julian Broll starting teaching at the Wilhelm-Kaisen-Oberschule in Bremen at 2021, upon completion of his master’s of education at the Georg August University in Göttingen, in which he specialised in German and history. During his studies for his bachelor’s degree at the Georg August University he also gained several additional qualifications in interculturality and multi-lingualism and spent time exploring the school subject of ‘happiness’. Julian Broll was sponsored during his studies by the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft (sdw) through the teacher training funding programme ‘Studienkolleg’

About the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI)

The GEI conducts research into the production, content and appropriation of educational media for schools in its socio-cultural, political, economic and historical contexts. The Institute also provides unique research infrastructure services that are founded in research and available on site and digitally. At the core of the Institute is its research library containing the world’s most comprehensive collection of international textbooks for the subjects of history, social studies/politics, geography and ethics/religion. The Institute develops digital, freely available infrastructure services for research in the cultural and social sciences and the humanities, related to educational media as used in schools. The Institute also provides transfer services using different critical research perspectives for application in national and international education practice and theory.

Further information on the Georg Eckert Research Award:

https://www.gei.de/en/knowledge-transfer/awards/georg-eckert-forschungspreis

Contact:
Catrin Schoneville
Wissenschaftskommunikation
Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsmedien | Georg-Eckert-Institut
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schoneville@leibniz-gei.de

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