Educational Sciences

The total of six institutes is presently made up of around 50 professorships and some 170 research associates. Roughly half of the professors are women, and among the non-professorial academic staff women currently account for around 65 %. The winter term 2011/12 saw the successive introduction of Bachelor’s (BA and BSc) and Master’s (MEd) teaching degrees (more than 9000 students). In addition, undergraduate degree courses (BA/MA) are offered in Social Work Studies (around 900 students), in Educational Science with the MA Adult Education and Further ­Education programme and online further education courses in Educational Media and Educational Leadership. The 2012 Funding Atlas of the DFG (German ­Research Foundation) describes the UDE as the university receiving the highest DFG funding in educational science in Germany (this is the first subject area in which the UDE has occupied the top rank).
During the reporting period, the research conducted in the faculty by the DFG Research Unit and Research Training Group Teaching and Learning of Science (nwu-essen) stands out in particular. The faculty is made up of eminent ­researchers who, among their other roles, are also DFG reviewers and members of the DFG ­Senate. The Centre for Empirical Educational Research and the College for Gender Research in Essen (both central scientific institutions of the UDE) benefit considerably from the initiative of researchers from the Faculty of Educational ­Sciences. During the past years, externally funded graduate programmes have been established in the research areas of Business Education and ­Social Work and are part of a successful strategy of promoting young researchers. Among them, the graduate programme “Contradictions in ­societal integration. On the transformation of social work”, funded by the Hans-Böckler ­Foundation, is characterized by a particularly close cooperation with universities of applied sciences in North Rhine-Westphalia.
What sets the Faculty of Educational ­Sciences apart is its productive combination of innovative research and development work and critical (self-)reflection on developments in the educational and social sector. The focus on central themes such as heterogeneity and diversity brings together the classic ­approaches of inequality and justice research with more recent forms of research on ­migration, gender, and intersectionality, and with educational theory and ­ideological criticism. In a national comparison of educational departments and faculties, the UDE is rated as being especially strong on research. The faculty’s own core research themes ­correspond very extensively to those of the UDE’s Main Research Areas. This applies to ­spatial dimensions of educational and social ­research, educational and social reporting, ­municipal systems of reporting, municipal health promotion and preventive care, and evaluation and intervention research, all of which contribute to the Main Research Area of “Urban Systems”. This is complemented by research ­activities in Empirical Educational Research, ­another of the UDE’s Main Research Areas. It is supported by the DFG Research Unit and ­Research Training Group on Teaching and Learning of Science (nwu-essen), which includes profession research and skills development in teaching and education, as well as trans­form­ation and governance research in the social and educational sector.