Luisa Girnus is a junior professor of political didactics at Freie Universität Berlin and focuses her work on Education for Sustainable Development and Transformative Education. Since 2011, she has been researching and teaching in the field of civic education, first at the University of Bremen and later at the University of Potsdam. In her research, she has dealt with political didactic questions on political legitimacy and statehood in transition. She is currently researching questions at the nexus of political didactics with Education for Sustainable Development and Transformative Education, learning processes in social discourse on values, as well as language-sensitive and gender-equitable teaching in the social sciences. She has also published on political education in the context of technology and digitization as well as empirical teaching-learning research in the social sciences.

Being one of the initiators of the task force Political Education and Gender within the Society for Political Didactics and Political Youth and Adult Education, she advocates for stronger gender and intersectional perspectives in political didactics. She is an active member of the speakers’ group of the Political Science and Political Education section of the German Political Science Association (DVPW, Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaften). She is also involved in the state board of the German Association for Political Education (DVPB, Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Bildung) Brandenburg and a member of the federal board of the DVPB. Since 2018, she has been a member of the editorial team of the journal POLIS. 

Partnerships

The Center for Political Didactics, Education for Sustainable Development and Transformative Education partners with the participatory initiative Sustain it!, an action and participation initiative that invites everyone who wants to help shape Freie Universität and the city of Berlin in a sustainable and future-oriented way with their own ideas and projects. Students and doctoral candidates from a wide range of disciplines are involved, as well as professors, academic staff, artists and cultural professionals, environmental activists and both young and older professionals from the university and urban community. We are united by the fact that we have been implementing the idea of socio-ecological transformation with educational and campaign formats right here on campus since 2010.

The Center seeks out alternative forms of knowledge production and learning culture and is always open to exchange and cooperation with practitioners and academics.

ESD through the lens of political didactics

Education for sustainable development (ESD) seeks to empower people to think and act in a sustainable way (BMBF, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, 2020). With this comprehensive educational goal, it addresses all areas of life that offer learning opportunities. Associated goals such as ecological responsibility or social justice are highly compatible with the guiding principles of political education. Nevertheless, education for sustainable development contains a strong normative component that has a contradictory effect: Education for sustainable development is not only an educational framework, but also a clearly defined political strategy.

Based on this complex relationship, the research project explores the questions of how education for sustainable development is positioned in the current political didactic discourse and what added value may lie in a stronger integration of political didactic considerations with the concepts of education for sustainable development. A research model using the Delphi method will be used in the empirical analysis. This method is particularly well suited to opening up fields of research and creating forecasts (Cuhls 2019).

The Delphi process will be divided into three survey stages: The first stage involves gathering as broad a range of expertise on the subject area as possible. This is achieved by means of a standardized online survey addressed to individuals working in the field of political didactics. On the basis of this online survey’s findings, individuals from the field will be interviewed during the second stage. These interviews will be evaluated using qualitative content analysis. Both the findings of the first and second stages will then form the baseline for expert workshops as part of the third stage of the Delphi study. In the workshops, conceptual and practice-oriented building blocks for political education for sustainable development will be drawn up. Decision-making mechanisms as well as inclusions and exclusions of the various empirical and theoretical findings will be observed. The inclusion of existing political didactic expertise in all phases of the project will be one of the project’s characteristic features.

BMBF [Federal Ministry of Education and Research] (2020) Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung, at: https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/de/bildung/bildung-fuer-nachhaltige-entwicklung/bildung-fuer-nachhaltige-entwicklung_node.html (accessed June 14, 2023)

Cuhls K. (2019). Die Delphi-Methode – eine Einführung. In M. Niederberger & O. Renn (Eds.) Delphi-Verfahren in den Sozial- und Gesundheitswissenschaften (pp. 3-31). Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-21657-3_1