Unique Profile Areas

We are focussing our activities in student education and research on three complementary so-called profile areas, which are

1. Education in a democratic society,
2. Educational processes in the digital world,
3. STEM in a culture of sustainability. 

Democratic societies provide people with extensive and multifaceted opportunities. At the same time, however, they confront their citizens with challenges and require them to become involved. Against this background, key educational goals such as the ability to make differentiated judgements and to act in plural contexts as well as the need to constantly expand our capacity to participate have become the focus of attention.

Our "Education in a Democratic Society" profile area addresses this complex set of issues. It pools and initiates projects dealing with the current challenges of democratic societies from an interdisciplinary perspective and addressing the possibilities of education promoting participation, tolerance, and solidarity. The profile thus acts as a communication platform and hub.

Key thematic and research areas include values, the concept of man, life orientation in a plural society, life designing and discourse skills, ways of enabling political and cultural participation, educating for democracy and ways of political enlightenment, educational equality, equal opportunity, integration and inclusion, prevention of anti-Semitism as well as practical approaches to dealing with "alternative facts", fake news, and populism.

Through research, development, and consultation, the profile also seeks to respond to the need for development and transformation in educational and cultural institutions, which has become even more apparent during the coronavirus pandemic.

The digital age presents both teachers and learners with new challenges, but it also offers new opportunities. For example, using digital tools, content can be made more adaptive, motivating, and comprehensible. Planning, designing, and implementing digital educational formats in a way that promotes learning requires a cross-disciplinary perspective combining pedagogical and technical competences in both research and teaching. The Institute of Informatics and Digital Education, in cooperation with Teaching Methodology, is the central point of contact in this regard, ensuring that all students have the opportunity to acquire and deepen the necessary digital skills.

At the same time, digitisation requires a transformation of the organisational environment in which digital innovations are embedded at the various stages of the teaching and learning processes. To support these efforts, our university is currently running projects focusing on the development of the students’ digital competences and the further development of digital examination formats.

The profile area is intended to promote interdisciplinary exchange, cooperation with colleagues within the institution, and the strengthening of cooperative relationships at both national and international level. The profile area also seeks the dialogue with schools in order to be able to draw conclusions from their experiences with digitalisation and to prepare future teachers in the best possible way for the rapidly changing real-world teaching environment. The key topics in research and teaching include:

• Researching and teaching how to optimise digitally supported educational processes.
• Considering the opportunities and challenges of developing and implementing digital teaching and learning formats.
• Discussing ethical, anthropological, epistemological, and societal issues in the context of deploying digital technologies in education.
• Designing and researching the impact of the latest technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and related tools.
• Looking at the effects of digital education on cognitive, emotional, social, motivational, and metacognitive variables in a holistic way.

This profile area aims to pool activities in teaching and research in the field of the STEM subjects (Mathematics, Informatics, Natural Sciences, Technical Education) and sustainability in order to contribute to addressing and tackling the complex challenges and issues of our time from different perspectives and against the background of our areas of expertise – Teaching Methodology and Educational Sciences. In this profile area, we work to establish sustainability at the university and to make sustainable developments visible.

We pool the activities of the Teaching and Learning Labs, in which our students are given the opportunity to gain hands-on experience at an early stage, and present our research findings on STEM and sustainability to the public. Since the winter semester 2022/2023, we have been offering the lecture series “STEM in a Culture of Sustainability” once a semester. In this series, we invite external speakers who can provide new food for thought in the area of STEM and/or sustainability.

In order to strengthen the culture of sustainability in the area of STEM, we develop and operate interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Labs (TLL), in which students can explore how to act and design across disciplines and how to innovate in a socially responsible way.