Research-oriented teaching aims to promote students as researchers - in the sense of the shift from teaching to learning that is repeatedly called for in university teaching - i.e. they go through and organise all phases of the research process themselves and thus acquire skills in the following areas:

• Developing their own questions,
• methodically reflected work,
• self-critical analysis of their own information habits,
• critically scrutinising traditional habits of perception and judgement in science and society,
• open communication, dialogue-oriented and discursive (further) development of concepts,
• cautious expansion of the discourse horizon through internationalisation,
• the ability to present research results in research circles and/or to the non-academic public.

As part of the so-called "Quality Pact for Teaching", the Presidential Board of the University of Oldenburg has successfully raised funds to strengthen research-oriented teaching, a large proportion of which flows directly into the Schools. School IV relies on a structure in which a team of lecturers from all four Institutes acts as a research team, i.e. works on compatible and discursive issues, and forms an organisational and supervisory team to manage research-oriented teaching in the subjects. The thematic bracket is formed by the analysis and processing of lifeworld tensions under the title "Living with tensions: Agonies in research in the humanities and humanistic sciences".

As part of the aforementioned initiative, the Institute is working on the project "Competing claims to interpretation and powers of definition in the context of religious pluralisation: agonies in a historical-cultural studies perspective".