The Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) conducts applied and multidisciplinary research into educational media used in schools, informed primarily by history and cultural studies. It explores the production, content and appropriation of educational media in their socio-cultural, political, economic and historical contexts. The Institute also provides infrastructure services designed by and for researchers in cultural studies and humanities, information sciences, information technology and digital humanities.
Key Research Area 1: Digital transformations
The GEI addresses three key aspects of digital transformations: Firstly, it explores the media themselves by analysing, deliberating upon and helping to design digital educational media such as digital games and textbooks or post-digital, hybrid materials. Such research focusses on how new educational materials are developed for the classroom and to what extent schools will be restructured by such technology. The second aspect explores such materials from the point of view of the users and the GEI is involved in new analytical processes for researching digital corpora in terms of the provision and further development of digital tools for indexing and processing educational media. Finally the GEI repeatedly examines the use of tools it has designed in order to continually develop them and enable their research-oriented application.
Key Research Area 2: Practices in Schools and Lessons
The GEI understands schools as places in which educational practice, media appropriation and social processes of change can be observed. Research in this area focusses primarily on the institutional frameworks within which educational media practices are produced. The research projects also ask how analogue educational media and new technological practices shape lessons, schools and subsequently society as a whole. Finally they also employ a subject-specific, trans-discpiplinary perspective to explore the ways in which approaches and principles such as critical thinking, multiperspectivitiy or participation are addressed by educational media, how they are theoretically substantiated in educational media research and subsequently configured, and how they are expressed through media, practice and content.
Key Research Area 3: Orders of Knowledge
The GEI asks which knowledge is represented in educational media for schools, in what form and under which conditions. Research projects informed by history and cultural studies perspectives examine social orders, technological frameworks of media, discursive negotiation processes and how knowledge is represented in educational media for schools. They explore how educational media for schools reflect, influence and are themselves framed by political, economic, media and epistemic orders. Such projects also research how the knowledge transmitted through educational media for schools contributes to discourses within the social dynamics of pluralisation and polarisation. Finally this key research area also focusses on the organization of knowledge in relation to educational media, from an information science perspective.
