There are several research training groups at the Heidelberg University of Education. They offer a structured training programme and a thematically focused research programme with an interdisciplinary orientation. Through these research training groups, our PhD students prepare intensively for a career in academia whilst also being encouraged to develop their own independent research skills.
The Annelie Wellensiek Centre for Inclusive Education (AW-ZIB) is a research institute and the Inclusion Department within the Faculty of Educational and Social Sciences at Heidelberg University of Education. Since November 2020, people with and without disabilities have been teaching and conducting research together here on the topic of inclusion. A key focus of the centre’s work is on higher education programmes delivered by several members of staff who, following a period working at a workshop for people with disabilities, have successfully completed a three-year full-time qualification as educational specialists. A doctoral programme has been established at the AW-ZIB for a period of six years to support the accompanying research. The early-career research group consists of a junior professorship and a total of four doctoral candidates (two pairs of teaching staff seconded to pursue their doctorates for three years each). Under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Vera Heyl and Prof. Dr Karin Terfloth, as well as the junior professorship, the doctoral candidates are working on three sub-projects which examine the impact of the educational work carried out by educational specialists, the evaluation and further development of educational programmes, and the evaluation and further development of the training of educational specialists.
A new research training group has been established at the Universities of Teacher Education in Lucerne and Heidelberg. The programme focuses increasingly on empirical subject-specific didactic research and on transferring findings from the respective projects into educational practice, drawing on the strengths of the universities of teacher education: the integration of research and practice.
In EFFORT, the transfer between practice and research is understood as a bidirectional transformative process: on the one hand, insights from practice are increasingly incorporated into subject-specific didactic research projects. On the other hand, findings from subject-specific didactic research are used to enhance the quality of teaching and educational practice.
The Research and Early-Career Scholars’ Programme is dedicated to investigating the influences, structures and opportunities for developing diagnostic competence. A systematic approach to the diverse aspects of this complex construct is provided by distinguishing between diagnostic dispositions (knowledge, motivation), processes of diagnostic thinking (perception, interpretation, action) and the performance of diagnostic actions.
Twelve sub-projects combine recent research approaches and utilise methods of competence modelling, the assessment of judgement accuracy, and the experimentally controlled variation of relevant influencing variables on the part of the teacher. In particular, through collaboration between psychology, educational science and subject-specific didactics, the body of evidence is to be expanded and the theoretical understanding of diagnostic competence improved and systematised.
Since 1 August 2020, the DaF/DaZ doctoral programme ‘From subject-sensitive language teaching to language-sensitive subject teaching’ – a joint project of the six universities of education in Baden-Württemberg – has entered its second funding phase. During the first funding phase, the research focused on the conditions necessary for the successful educational participation of pupils with German as a second language who lack sufficient proficiency in educational and subject-specific language registers. The sub-projects in the second funding phase build on the findings from the DaF/DaZ I doctoral programme. A key focus of the work within this inter-university doctoral programme is the expansion of subject-specific language training in the classroom.
The Heidelberg sub-project ImPuLsE (Professionalising teachers’ instructional practices during teaching placements: learning to support language development) is developing and researching a conversation-analytically based interaction training programme for (prospective) subject teachers.