The professorship of Educational Science with a focus on elementary school pedagogy is one of three school level-related professorships in the Institute of Educational Science. The focus of the department is on educational science and elementary school pedagogy theory and research. A major goal of the field is to bring together the perspectives of childhood and elementary school research, i.e., to view children as actors and to investigate the ways in which children's changed life worlds are absorbed and processed and which orientations and behaviors develop from this in elementary school. This connection of the discourses of elementary education and childhood studies requires a change of perspective towards the students, the children and learning. My research interests focus on the everyday life of schools and classrooms, especially on the processes of children's understanding of the world in tension with pedagogical practice and in the context of institutional and societal structural problems. The connection between childhood and elementary school research is intended to make the critical analysis of difference and the distinguishing practices of being a child and a student or an adult and a teacher an epistemological principle in the analysis of generational and teaching relationships. My teaching activities relate in particular to the core areas of elementary school pedagogy. In the school system of the Federal Republic of Germany, it is a school for children, represents their first and fundamental school experience, and socializes them into students. The student body consists of diverse learning groups; this heterogeneity requires social integration and differentiation in teaching. In university teaching, I also focus on casework and research-based learning, pedagogical self-reflection, and the qualification for child-centered conversational practice and understanding children.
