What role does 'the economy' play in schooling, and how has this changed over time? The EdTech 4.0? (Bildungsmedien 4.0?) project takes a double look at this question. We look at the knowledges that are circulated in educational media for economic education, and we explore the processes of developing and producing these textbooks. The project is conducted in cooperation with the Helmut-Schmidt University in Hamburg, which focuses on complementary learning materials.

The GEI's project investigates economics textbooks. Taking a diachronic approach, we analyse textbooks from 1995 to 2020. How have the priorities changed? Which discourses are constructed in the textbooks? How are economic theories and controversies presented to students? Which digital sources are included in more recent textbooks, and how do these intermedial relations affect the economics made available to students?

Taking a discourse analytical approach, the project focuses on the different kinds of discourses which are predominant, how these shift and which lines of flight become visible in the corpus of textbooks. We also plan to conduct interviews with the producers and developers of textbooks, to explore, firstly, the understandings of economics, but also, secondly, how the process of developing textbooks has changed over recent years, alongside technological changes in the publishing industry. As textbooks are increasingly available in digital formats,or 'born digital', how does this affect the production of economics textbooks?

Publications

Karcher, M., Ntonti, A., Trupp, J., & Voss, C. (2023). Die ambivalente Pluralisierung ‚ökonomischer Bildung‘ im Kontext der Digitalisierung. In A. Heinemann, Y. Karakaşoğlu, T. Linnemann, N. Rose, & T. Sturm (Eds.), Entgrenzungen: Beiträge zum 28. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft (pp. 159-169): Barbara Budrich.

Team: Prof. Dr. Felicitas Macgilchrist, Johann Trupp

Duration: 2020-2024

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Partners: Thomas Höhne | Helmut Schmidt Universität Hamburg