Contested Public Education, Pedagogical Conceptions and Sustainable Innovations

In Germany and the U.S., control for public education is seen as the states’ responsibility within the respective nation states and, despite different developments, both countries are experiencing similar challenges to public education, including shifts toward digitization, highly diverse classroom settings, pressures from neoliberal policies, and debates about citizenship education in a world that is increasingly globalized, yet also facing growing nationalism. These challenges raise questions about the role of education within sustainable societies that are also threatened by recent crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change.

Against this background, scholars from the U.S. and Germany will engage in a cross-national dialogue that considers these different developments and similarities across borders as well as variances in the approaches chosen to deal with the challenges. The panelists will refer to examples from education science, educational practice, and educational policy with all discussions framed by considerations of the role of pedagogy in each context. What kind of approaches are needed to better adapt schools to ideas of sustainability, digitalization and (inter)cultural sensitivity? The panels extend an earlier panel ‘Public Education at the Crossroads’ held at the DWIH NY in April 2018 and published in the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) in spring 2021.