In December 2024, Dr. Luisa Girnus was appointed as a junior professor of political didactics. In this interview, she explains how she aims to drive innovation in teaching, research, and knowledge transfer through her focus on ESD.

Dr. Girnus, how can civic education contribute not only to reflecting on societal transformations but also to actively shaping them? 

A core element of civic education is both to empower participation and to contribute to the critical and emancipatory maturity of citizens. For this reason, civic education is, by its very nature, well-suited to advancing democratization and social transformation. Civic education at a university operates on multiple levels and is particularly relevant, for example, in teacher training programs: Here, students become multipliers in both democracy education and ESD.

We are currently witnessing many social upheavals, which are also reflected in a growing skepticism toward science. What new challenges arise from these currents for civic education and its teaching methods, and how do you address them?

Fundamentally, we must engage more intensively today than we did a few years ago with the challenges posed by anti-democratic movements. However, there is no evidence of a general skepticism toward science among the population. What we do observe among our students, however, is that despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the numerous available sources of information, they do not consistently base their views on evidence and are, in some cases, susceptible to populist narratives. Here, we try to demonstrate, without lecturing!, the importance of science and how it can provide guidance. There is no single, grand solution here; that would also contradict the fundamental principle of pluralism. Rather, the focus should be on how diversity, including the diversity of learning, can be lived out.

Given this context, what priorities have you set in your work?

 Given the multitude of challenges and tasks, this is not always easy. It is important to me to bring more people into contact with science and scientific findings, but also to generate enthusiasm for political ESD. To this end, I rely on collaborations both within the university, such as currently with colleagues for political-literary learning in elementary schools, and outside the university. For me, it is essential to link ESD more closely to issues of social justice and to reflect more deeply on human-nature relationships from a political-didactic perspective, including intersectionally. We implement these ideas in our own practice within our department and explore what transformative education can look like in teaching and university life.

The Center for Political Didactics works closely with the Schools@University for Sustainability + Climate Protection. Can you explain how ESD and political education are successfully linked here?

This collaboration beautifully illustrates how synergies can be leveraged. As part of the Schools@University program, students of political didactics can put their own workshop concepts and ideas into practice with school classes and test how well they work. Naturally, our students gain much more from this practical experience than if they were merely presenting a concept.

One of your goals is to further advance ESD at Freie Universität. How are you going about this?

Work on sustainability and ESD is already underway in many areas of Freie Universität, but not everyone is always aware of each other’s efforts. My goal is to identify and make this networking potential visible in cooperation with other university units, such as the Sustainability & Energy Management Unit. I also focus on leveraging synergies, for example by bringing together separate discourses. Another goal is to integrate existing successful structures, such as the Dahlem School of Education and the Campus Zukunftsbildung, into our ESD activities as effectively as possible.

If you could make a wish, how would you like to see Freie Universität Berlin positioned in the area of ESD in five years?

I would be quite happy if as many of the projects mentioned as possible were implemented, both within Freie Universität and outside of it. In the future, we would certainly like to serve as and be perceived as a key point of contact and sounding board for ESD at our university. And my greatest wish, of course, is that in five years, Freie Universität will be even more sustainably positioned in teaching with an even more refined ESD profile.

The interview was conducted by Judith Hübner, Katrin Schweigel, and Andreas Wanke.
It first appeared in Freie Universität Berlin’s 2026 Sustainability Report.