Guiding Principles of Knowledge Exchange for the Faculty of Education

The faculty trains good teachers and highly qualified education experts and sees knowledge exchange as an interactive process of constructive, creative cooperation. The faculty would like to support educators in their work and to encourage them to critically reflect upon it. It would like to invite them to reflect on their own educational perspectives, activities, and attitudes and to allow their daily practice to guide this reflection. The faculty’s researchers do their research for and with educators. It avails practitioners of its research findings and the knowledge relevant to teaching for direct use and discussion, and it guides the processes for professionalizing and understanding the development of lesson plans and daily teaching activities. In this way, we work together to improve education and continue education in schools and elsewhere while ensuring that results flow back into educational research.

Quality development in educational institutions is both the goal and the driving force for the Faculty of Education. The faculty is a critical contact throughout developmental processes in educational institutions and always ready to share its expertise. This can entail questions or inspire new perspectives that lead to unexpected places and previously unknown solutions. At the same time, the faculty takes impetus from educational institutions for research and development topics so that developmental processes can succeed through different forms of cooperation and the exchange of mutual perspectives. Our partners are leading players in teaching institutions, although there are also many others involved.

The faculty’s researchers share scientifically sound findings and their expertise with education policymakers and in administrative contexts to guide decision-making. Our colleagues are dialog partners for decision-makers, fostering evidence-based decisions and evaluation. The faculty finds research topics and ideas from the problems and challenges arising in daily educational practice and acts as a strong partner for the future development of the educational system in Hamburg, Germany, and the world.

The faculty’s vision of knowledge exchange focuses not only on teaching activities and educators but on society as a whole. The faculty wants to raise awareness about educational issues and teaching attitudes and to foster participation and a culture of sharing: sharing data, knowledge, and expertise and learning from experts in the field.  The faculty communicates scientific findings to foster awareness of education as an actor in the areas of science and knowledge exchange and to share our findings with society at large. Knowledge exchange takes place in many ways—for example, as participatory and cocreative research, service learning, learning by doing, or learning through research. The faculty tackles social challenges and transformations such as digitalization, linguistic diversity, and peace building head-on.