Initiated by the IMAFREDU research project of Dr. Elina Marmer, last year a collective of authors, among others with the participation of glokal, developed a “Racism Critical Guide for Reflecting on Existing and Creating New Didactic Teaching and Learning Materials for School and Out-of-School Educational Work on Blackness, Africa and the African Diaspora”. It is now available digitally and will soon be available in print.

The urgency of a racism-critical revision of school educational materials was highlighted in a textbook study Migration and Integration published in March by the Federal Government Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration, Minister of State Aydan Özoğuz. The study shows a great need to catch up in the production of textbooks in many areas. for example, in the representation and address of the German migration society:

“Thus, a key finding is that in the textbooks analyzed, migration is primarily problematized as conflictual as well as crisis-ridden. The approach of presenting migration-based diversity as normality is rarely found.”

In addition to textbooks, however, the framework curricula of the federal states are also subject to criticism. The Berlin Development Policy Council (BER) has recently written an evaluation of the new Berlin framework curricula, in which perspectives critical of racism were strongly advocated:

“When addressing global interrelationships, the perspectives of people from the Global South must be included and existing prejudices critically reflected upon. In the designs examined, this still happens too rarely. Rather, they are expressions of Eurocentric views and worldviews, as evidenced, for example, by the uncritical use of terms such as ‘discoveries’ and ‘the new world.'”

In this context, it is also worth mentioning once again the criticism of Decolonize Orientation Framework!