Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Science - History of Education

(DFG project supervised by Marcelo Caruso)

Project Description

The main concern of this conceptual-historical research project lies in the analysis of the emergence, implementation, variance and transformation of the adjective "pädagogisch" (pedagogical) in the so-called bridge time (the term "Sattelzeit" was coined by Reinhart Koselleck and denotes the period between 1750 and 1850). While conceptual-historical projects usually focus on nouns as their objects, in this project the adjective will be central for the analysis of the horizons of experience and expectation (above all within German educational journals), since – so the assumption – "pädagogisch" as a qualifying adjective plays a significant role in the subject-related as well as the scientific discourse and thus in shaping the horizons of meaning in various fields of education. The research objectives can be translated into the following questions: Since when has the term "pädagogisch" been used to categorize specific activities and materials (emergence)? Has "pädagogisch" been used with increasing intensity and did it possibly replace other terms (implementation)? Furthermore, it will be examined whether the term was used more intensively or less intensively (variance) in institutionally differentiated pedagogical fields (especially in elementary and secondary schools). Can new definitions of the term be found or is “pädagogisch" characterized by a relatively high semantic consistency (transformation)? In addition, this project serves as a historiographic contribution to the research of the historicity of terms whose semantic fields are not captured by nouns.

Methodologically, the project folllows the model of Lüsebrink (1988) since the examination of the conceptual field is based on the evaluation of several levels (lexical, semantic, intermedial, interdiscursive and socio-cultural), which are combined with a history of concepts and discourses. This should allow to grasp the complex relationships between words, concepts and discursively mediated subjects. The various levels of the analysis require at least two steps. As a necessary first step, a register of words/concepts which are used in connection with the characterization of "pädagogisch" will be compiled. In a second step, the selected corpus can then be examined, comprehensively coded and analyzed. OCR-enabled digital representations of relevant journals from the bridge time are used for the wide-ranging quantitative recording and qualitative research.

  Project Financing

The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).

Project Head

Prof. Dr. Marcelo Caruso

Project Team

Research Assistant: Daniel Przygoda, Friedrich Schollmeyer

Student Assistants: Ronja Dierks, Jan Uredat