Research focus

Head of a religious education empirical classroom research group.

The primary goal of the research group is to conduct the empirical classroom research study "Conversations in Religious Education." A secondary goal is to prepare the recorded lessons in religion for teaching.

A Empirical Research Projects

I A Classroom Research Project on Didactic Staging Patterns of Conversational Phases in the Context of Religious Instruction

In the Kassel teaching research project "Conversations in Religious Education", the initiation and design of religious learning processes among children and adolescents by teachers of religious education is to be investigated. The focus of the analysis is the course of communication in class and its control by the teachers. Of particular interest is the form and structure of conversations in religious education. On the basis of videotaped lesson recordings from secondary level I, it will be recorded how religion teachers stage lesson conversations on the central systematic-theological topics of the Trinity and eschatology and how these lesson conversations proceed in their dynamics.

Preparation of a follow-up project: An intervention study to strengthen the participation of students in class discussions in religious education.

B Teaching and research projects

I P34 Representation of Sexualized Violence in the Bible and Religious Education

A teaching and research project together with my colleague Prof. Dr. Ilse Müllner and WB Dr. Nele Spiering-Schomborg (currently funded as a Pronet project)

II P35 Theological Interdisciplinarity and Interreligious Education in the Education of Teachers of Religion

In phase 2 together with my colleagues Prof. Dr. Ilse Müllner and Prof. Dr. Mirja Kutzer as well as WB Raphael Schlehahn (currently funded as a Pronet project).

The project focuses on the opportunities of intergenerational and interdisciplinary learning in the education of theological teacher candidates - for example in cooperation with schools, seminaries and the school department of the diocese of Fulda.

Pupils, student teachers and teachers in further education and training learn within the framework of an interdisciplinary module (M17) on a thematic focus intentional and from each other, about each other and with each other. The events are part of the curriculum of the Institute for Catholic Theology at the University of Kassel.

C Further research topics

I Understanding of performance and performance assessment in religious education 

II Violence from a religious education perspective
(discourses on approaches to peace education, gender and violence, violence in schools)

III Inquiries into and consequences for religious adult education work through the empirical perception of religious and non-religious forms of shaping lives and interpreting the world by women and men in view of the (religiously) plural present situation 

IV Contemporary art as an occasion for religious learning

V Migration, flight and expulsion as theological and religious pedagogical challenges

VI Biographical learning