Why political and vocational education go together

What is this episode about?
Welcome to another episode of the John Dewey Evening School. We have another important episode for you today. Today we want to look at the potential that vocational training offers for political education. This episode is important to us because it took us a while to understand the diverse structures of vocational education - it's not exactly clear. But after a while we managed to do that and we realized what a treasure lies hidden in this area and we want to make it visible today.

Before we start:
Like most evening school episodes, the episode is just under 30 minutes long and is based very much on findings from Monitor politische Bildung - which we also strongly recommend for in-depth reading.

The central question is:
How can cooperation between extracurricular political youth and adult education and vocational training succeed? What do we need to know and where is there concrete potential?

Who speaks?
The author and speaker in this episode is Prof. Dr. Anja Besand, Director of the John Dewey Research Center and Chair of Didactics of Civic Education at the TUD Dresden University of Technology. You can find out more about her here.

We hope you enjoy it and look forward to your feedback.

Literature for further reading:

Behrens, Rico/Besand, Anja/Breuer, Stefan (2021): Politische Bildung in reaktionären Zeiten - Plädoyer für eine standhafte Schule, Frankfurt. Title availableas a free e-book

Besand, Anja: Monitor political education at vocational schools, Schalbach/Ts. 2014

Besand, Anja/Hölzel, Tina (2018): "I also like those who are complicated." - On responsibility and attention, in: Sonderpädagogische Förderung heute special issue: inclusive didactics of civic education

Besand, Anja/Hölzel, Tina (2018): Von einem wünschenswerten Dialog oder: Was die allgemeinbildenden Schulen von berufsbildenden im Umgang mit Heterogenität und Vielfalt lernen können, in: Langer Anke (ed.) Inklusion pp. 190-198

BMFSFJ (2020): 16th Children and Youth Report, Strengthening democratic education in childhood and adolescence, Berlin The report has a separate chapter on the potential of vocational education which we highly recommend - available online

JuRe publication 2021 Student participation in vocational schools - available online

Self-assessment tasks

For users of the evening school, we provide self-assessment tasks for each lecture. These tasks can be used to rethink the contribution, to deepen your thoughts or - if you want to obtain a certificate of further education - to prepare for the course exam.

Question 1: The field of vocational training is not exactly defined. How would you describe this area and which starting points or areas do you think would be particularly beneficial for cooperation between vocational and political education?

Question 2: In our evening school play, we focus in particular on the area of the vocational transition system. It is not exactly easy to make political education suitable here. Outline a project or approach that you would choose for this area of activity.

Question 3: In case you already have experience with civic education in the context of vocational education - how would you describe the specific challenges?

Question 4: In our piece on political and vocational education, we particularly promote teachers and trainers as a target group for political education programs. What experience do you have in this area and what strategies do you think are promising here?

The self-assessment tasks are to be understood as opportunities for reflection and do not generally test knowledge. They are always strongly related to the corresponding lecture and therefore differ significantly.

You can find a manuscript of this piece here.