Between and Beyond. The Course of a Life in the Realms of History of Education, General Pedagogy and Comparative Studies. Interview with Edwin Keiner

Abstract

Edwin Keiner held the chair for General Pedagogy and Social Pedagogy at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano until his retirement in October 2019. From 2014 to 2017 he also served as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Education at the same university. Prior to that, he worked as a professor for the History of Education and Socialisation at the University of Bochum and as a professor for General Pedagogy at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He has studied the theory and the history of education as an academic discipline with special interest in a comparative perspective. His academic focus is on methodology, historical and comparative research on educational research, and historical, empirical and comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches to and in educational research. For several years he took over the role as chairman of the Commission for Research on Educational Research and of the Section for General Pedagogy of the German Educational Research Association. In addition, Keiner was very active in the European Educational Research Association (EERA) for example as the first elected representative of all networks and member of the EERA Council. In 2018, Keiner succeeded in bringing the annual «European Conference on Educational Research» (ECER) with about 3,000 participants to the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, South Tyrol. He was a member of the «International Research Community ‘Philosophy and History of The Discipline of Education’» (University Leuven, Belgium) for almost 20 years and member of the editorial boards of Paedagogica Historica, European Educational Research Journal and Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability. At present, Edwin Keiner works part-time as a senior professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany.