The Department of School Pedagogy and General Didactics places its research focus on studies of school change. We pursue the goal of "theoretical empiricism" (Kalthoff, Hirschauer, Lindemann, 2008) and attempt to bring empirical analyses into a fruitful interplay with theoretically productive considerations. Our studies operate in the field of tension between, on the one hand, programmatically intended and educational policy-induced processes of change, which are labelled with buzzwords such as "reform", "transformation", "innovation" or with the concepts of "school" and "teaching development", and, on the other hand, latent processes of cultural change in the school and learning culture. Using approaches from the spectrum of qualitative-reconstructive methods and drawing on cultural and structural theoretical perspectives, we will address the following questions:

School subject references and fields of change: what qualitative and content-related changes affect schools as social institutions and pedagogical organisations? Which forms of school behaviour are being upgraded in the context of pedagogical and school structural innovations? Which technologies are finding their way into school education?

Process qualities of change: How do change processes proceed beyond programmatic and rational visions of feasibility? How can contingency, non-linearity and uncertainty be integrated as part of intentional school and teaching development? What drives change in the school system? How is change intentionally organised and latently processed? How is the relationship between transformation and reproduction organised in specific social arenas?

Semantics of change: What do pedagogical and social discourses on digitalisation, inclusion and educational equity or on performance and care mean for the transformation of schools and pedagogy? How are they taken up, appropriated, transformed or produced by which school actors?

Places of change: At which places in the multi-level school system does change take place? How are such places created legally and administratively and what effects does this have on social interactions and relationships in schools? Which places for the stimulation of change are created by schools? What significance do reform and alternative schools have for the transformation of the mainstream school system?

Theories and methodologies of change: How can development processes in schools and classrooms be empirically reconstructed and theoretically described? Which reference problems are constitutive of development processes? How can theoretically based ideas of transformation and reproduction be fruitfully operationalised for empirical research?