globalDAS: Global Citizenship at German Schools Abroad
A project at the Georg Eckert Institute, Leibniz Institute for International Textbook research
Global citizenship education (GCE) is one of the key current topics in international education. The globalDAS project centres on the significance of print and digital educational media in enacting global citizenship in German Schools Abroad (Deutsche Auslandsschulen, DAS). The project contributes to academic debate on critical global citizenship and identifies ways forward for policy and practice. The uniquely transnational character of the DAS offers unique opportunities for research on GCE, given the German language focus, the traditional importance of critical thinking, and since DAS are the only types of school to bring together local, regional and international contexts with curricula, textbooks and digital educational media produced specifically for use in Germany.
Project duration: 2017-2018
Key Research Questions
The overarching question driving this research on global citizenship education at DAS is:
How do Deutsche Auslandsschulen in different parts of the world creatively appropriate global citizenship in their daily practices?
We are interested in, for instance:
- how pupils’ use of print and digital educational media in the classroom shape their understandings of global communities;
- how the diversity of DAS is linked to understandings of cultural and religious values;
- how pupils, individually and/or collectively, become engaged and take action through their media practices.
During the school visits we will use the following qualitative social research methods:
- Lesson observations
- Interviews with teachers and other staff
- Pupil focus groups
- Analysis of documents and media (curricula, education policy documents, textbooks, apps and other digital media)
The Georg Eckert Institute
The Georg Eckert Institute is a member of the Leibniz Association and conducts applied and multidisciplinary research into textbooks and educational media, informed primarily by history and cultural studies. It also provides advisory services to national and international education policymakers, practitioners and organizations, and frequently conducts studies supported by the Federal Foreign Office into issues of current interest.