Educational Offers for (primary school) children as Socio-Material Arrangements at Holocaust Memorials – On Conceptual Prefiguration

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Alexandra Flügel
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465638463

The study focuses on educational programs for children of primary school age offered by memorial sites that take place in the context of an examination of National Socialism under the conditions of institutional-organizational framings, programmatic claims of historical-political education and contradictions in the culture of remembrance. Following on from a description of children as special and vulnerable addressees, programmatic considerations on educational work with children at memorial sites point to specific pedagogical and didactic requirements. However, there is no empirical knowledge on the conceptualization of educational work with children at memorial sites. The study addresses this gap. In terms of practice theory, the educational offers are understood as socio-material arrangements that are produced with the participation of different people, spaces and materials in different places, both in the conceptualization of the offers and in their implementation. In the first sub-study, the implementation of the educational offers was examined. The empirical findings point to conceptual decisions and (didactic) modeling that prefigure the thematic and interactional implementation of the offers. Following on from this, the second part of the study focuses on the practice of conceptual prefiguration of educational offers, taking its relation to implementation practice into account. In this respect, the practice of prefiguration is not seen as prior, completed or determinative, but as an iterative and continuously evolving process of constitution. With this perspective, the study focuses on two aspects: Firstly, it is asked how the educational offers are conceptualized in order to work out which assumptions and ideas about children, about the topic of National Socialism, about the 'authentic' place and its anticipated effect, about claims to the culture of remembrance and about pedagogical-didactic claims to validity are made relevant and negotiated and how they merge into the conceptualization, (didactic) modelling and materialization of the educational offers. Secondly, following on from the first sub-study, the relationship between conceptualization and implementation practice is being examined in terms of how the educational arrangement is mutually constituted. In this way, the study draws on childhood theory discourses on generationalism on the one hand and on the perspective on socio-materiality in educational research on the other. Thus, the study enables the analysis of pedagogical-didactic practice requirements and (implicit) orders of knowledge and makes an empirical contribution to the systematic research and didacticization of educational work with children of primary school age at memorial sites.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants