Can the teaching of English be a place where democracy is discussed as much as it is practiced and lived? That question was at the heart of Dr. Andreas Wirag’s (Universität Göttingen) guest lecture here in Tübingen last week, “Demokratiebildung im Englischunterricht,” and it has been sitting with me since.
Dr. Wirag drew on empirical evidence, among other things a Bertelsmann Stiftung study on 1,000 teachers and the Robert Bosch “Deutsches Schulbarometer 25/26” on 1,500 students. His framework, the Council of Europe’s CDC model (Competences for a Democratic Culture), maps onto formats the EFL classroom already knows: role play, talk show, or simulated elections. Wirag sees a field already well on its way.
I share the appreciation of the discipline’s foundational work and its natural home ground here. I also see considerable room for consolidation and improvement in spelling out the details of democratic value systems across the thematic areas of EFL.
That connects directly to what we work on in our seminars on Critical Literacies, Global Issues, The Political in EFL, or Environmental Literacy. Let us build on this groundwork and connect teaching experiences to a coherent pedagogical vision.
#TEFL #Fremdsprachendidaktik #DemocracyEducation #EFL #CriticalLiteracies #LanguageTeaching
Originally posted on Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn, May 26, 2026.