The kinderladen movement as a case study for the anti-authoritarian educational movement. 1968 and education from the perspective of cultural history, the history of modernity, ande the history of the professions (1965-1977).

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Meike Baader
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 167210334

The DFG project The Kinderladen movement as a case study for the anti-authoritarian education movement. 1968 and education from the perspective of cultural history, the history of modernity, and the history of the professions (1965-1977) pursues the goal of examining the hitherto unexplored pedagogical dimensions of 68 using the example of the Kinderladen movement. In the first phase of the project the motives for the establishment of Kinderläden in Berlin, their social composition and their pedagogical approaches have been analysed from the perspective of cultural history and the history of modernity. A further concern has been to reconstruct the significance of sex education, which can now be described more precisely. Finally, an analysis of journals has been used to investigate to what extent the anti-authoritarian education movement was reflected in the discourse of education professionals. In the second year of the project, the effects of professionalization are being studied using an example of the training of childcare workers in Berlin. The results of the first phase of the project make it possible to describe both the heterogeneity and the scale of the Berlin Kinderladen movement with greater precision. In 1974 there were 304 projects in existence in Berlin. Finally, a preliminary analysis of specialist education journals has shown which themes of the anti-authoritarian education movement were picked up. Overall, it is possible to achieve well-founded results regarding the anti-authoritarian education movement and for research on 68 in general. In the light of the present findings and of the work programme for the second year of the project, the plan is to add a third year to the project and expand the perspective considerably in this year. The aim is to extend the focus beyond Berlin and include the anti-authoritarian education movement in Frankfurt, investigating how it was implemented and further developed by including a pilot day-care project. This project envisaged the transfer of elements from the anti-authoritarian Kinderläden into the established kindergarten system, and was the object of accompanying research by the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. A further aim is to examine the founding of alternative schools. Finally, the project will analyse reflections on the anti-authoritarian education in a broader corpus of professional education journals. It is expected that this will yield in-depth insights into the interplay of educational reform, educational research and pedagogical innovations in the period from 1965-1977. Enquiry will focus on the specific dynamics in the area of tension between New Social Movements, pedagogical spheres of activity, and the academic discipline of education. This is expected to yield results for a historiography of education after 1945, which will include both these impetuses and processes of modernization and the expansion of the field of education in the 1960s and 70s.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants