Allgemeine Pädagogik
Allgemeine Pädagogik
The origins of general pedagogy are closely linked to Oldenburg: The city is the birthplace of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776 - 1841), the founder of general pedagogy. And the roots of the Carl von Ossietzky University go back to the Protestant Teachers' Seminary founded in Oldenburg almost 250 years ago.
Our Oldenburg Department of General Education therefore looks back on a special past and is helping to shape the present and future through research and teaching. Our work focusses on the following topics:
- Aesthetic (media) education
- Relationship work as a pedagogical category
- Discourse and subjectivation research
- Feminist and post-structuralist theories of science
- Gender and class relations
- Children's rights and child welfare
- Power relations in (social) educational contexts
- Pedagogical utopia, nature and crisis relations
- Participation processes in teaching and learning
But what exactly is general pedagogy?
The "general" does not mean that the topics are unspecific, have no reference to specific fields of action or are not considered in detail. Rather, general pedagogy deals with basic educational science issues, fundamentals and basic concepts that are of general importance for pedagogy. This includes (according to the core curriculum of educational science ) in particular
- Terms of educational science and their change (e.g. upbringing, education, socialisation, learning, care, profession, organisation, teaching, generation, gender, biography, inclusion),
- theories of upbringing, education and socialisation as well as historiographical approaches to pedagogical designs and educational realities, and
- scientific and epistemological approaches in educational science.
These areas are relevant to every field of pedagogy, i.e. they are general (common to all), and can in turn gain significance in different ways in the various sub-disciplines, specialisms and fields of practice.
General pedagogy thus deals - to put it more presuppositionally - as a "cross-disciplinary sub-discipline" (Ehrenspeck 1998) with the foundations, basic questions and basic concepts of educational science in both an empirical and historical-systematic way. At the centre is the genealogical and structural elucidation of the historical development and social fabrication of current phenomena of educational reality, including their scientific research and categorical reflection.
Its function is, among other things, to strengthen the disciplinary contour of educational science by both distinguishing itself externally through its specific reference to educational processes and internally by offering an integrative reflective foil to the various sub-disciplines through historical, categorical and scientific-theoretical debates.
Literature:
Baumann, J. (1901). Introduction to pedagogy - history of pedagogical theories: General pedagogy (educational psychology). Leipzig: Veit & Comp.
Böhm, W. & Seichter, S. (2022). Dictionary of pedagogy (18th ed.). Paderborn: Schöningh.
Bünger, C. & Jergus, K. (2021). Dissolution of boundaries as a current problem of the discipline? Questions and perspectives of general educational science. Educational Science (32) 63, 83-90.
Ehrenspeck, Y. (1998). Subdisciplines without general educational science? Consequences of omitted reflection, conceptual criticism and basic research when importing the theory of "everyday life". Journal for Educational Science (1) 2, 181-202.
Jergus, K, Bünger, C., Fuchs, T., Althans, B. (eds.) (2022). Profiling the general - disciplinary-political perspectives on the contour of general educational science. Educational Science (33) 65.
Herbart, J. (1806/1965). General pedagogy derived from the purpose of education. Bochum: F. Kamp.
Kraft, V. (2012). Why still general pedagogy? Journal of Pedagogy (58) 3, 285-301.
Prange, K. (2008). Key works of pedagogy - Volume 2: From Fröbel to Luhmann. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Stein, M. (2024). General pedagogy (4th ed.). Munich: Ernst Reinhardt.