GraL 2023: Year in Review
The entire GraL team wishes you a happy new year!
We would like to close out 2023 with a year in review from the GraL doctoral students and summarize the workshops and conferences we attended in 2023.
In line with our project's focus on subjecting relevant reference texts on teacher education (e.g., core curricula or KMK resolutions) to a discourse analysis, we first visited the Duisburg Institute for Language and Social Research in earlyJuly. There, under the guidance of Benno Nothardt and Dr. Margarete Jäger, we attended a two-day workshop on ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’. Inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Critical Discourse Analysis is an empirical method that examines historical and contemporary discourses. It focuses on questions such as what is socially regarded as valid knowledge in society and how this knowledge is produced and passed on. It also examines the strategies used to narrow or expand the scope of what can be said. However, critical discourse analysis is only one of many types of discourse analysis that we deal with.
Since we are conducting both a document analysis and an interview study as part of the GraL project, we also traveled to Mannheim this summer to visit the GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences. There, we participated in the workshop “Qualitative Interviews – Theory and Practice” led by Prof. Günter Mey and Paul Sebastian Ruppel. In the GraL interview study, we are interested in the experiences of (prospective) teachers, which they are willing to share with us in interviews. We want to analye what these narratives reveal about teacher education. This complex process, from conducting interviews to analyzing the data, requires continuous critical self-reflection. Therefore, this will not be our last workshop on the topic of qualitative interviews.
At the end of July, we participated in the “19th Berlin Methodology Meeting on Qualitative Research,” which took place at the Free University of Berlin. There, too, we doctoral students participated in various formats (from workshops to research workshops and lectures) that were insightful for our own dissertation projects and for our work at GraL. For example, the following quote from the workshop on Foucaultian discourse analysis led by Prof. Rainer Diaz-Bone still resonates with us: „Discourse analysis can be used to examine the representation of inequality”.
In September, we attended the ‘Autumn Workshop 2023. Interpretative Research Methods in Education and Social Sciences’ in Bielefeld. As every year, this week was organized by Prof. Paul Mecheril, Prof. em. Bettina Dausien, and Dr. Daniela Rothe. In smaller interpretation workshops, we collaboratively interpreted material brought by participants (anonymized interview material, legal texts, schoolbooks, etc.). The aim is not to find correct or incorrect interpretations, but to develop convincing readings. It is important to pretend to be naïve and only work with the information provided by the text.
At the end of October, some of us attended the DeZIM Conference for Doctoral Students 2023 in Berlin. This conference enabled over 30 young/early-career researchers to network and exchange ideas. We discussed issues relating to ethical conduct and power relations in science. Questions about the obstacles and significance of racism critical research with regard to topics such as migration and integration were discussed by Prof. Robel Afeworki Abay, Tanja Gangarova, and Elizabeth Kaneza, among others, in the panel “Participatory Research Reflection and Collaboration with BIPoC Communities.”
In addition to this focus on input and output, the many encounters also had a lasting impact. Over delicious food and good coffee (very, very important!), we were able to engage in conversation and talk about our respective paths in academia. We made contacts with other young scientists who have since accompanied us and our work in various ways. After a very productive 2023, we are looking forward to 2024.
#Tldr: It was a good 2023. We saw, learned, talked, and ate a lot. We are looking forward to 2024!