Media, language and their impact on the development of young children’s political awareness - Thoughts and preliminary research results of an interdisciplinary research project

Abstract

The interdisciplinary project PoJoMeC, funded by The Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) in Germany, examines the political awareness and understanding of preschool and elementary school children. Thereby the interdisciplinary approach takes place from the perspective of political didactics, literature and media didactics, and journalism. The main research goal is to survey how political awareness of young children is expressed. Therefore, we draw on qualitative approaches, in which we focus (a) on the children's explicit knowledge, and (b) concepts of rule-based behavior. The different levels of abstraction of these concepts are based on a modification of the ecological model of human development according to Uri Bronfenbrenner (1979). This article outlines, on one hand, an interdisciplinary investigation for a viable concept of politics for research with children between the ages of 4 to 8 years. Therefore, we consider areas such as political didactics, literature and media studies, and philosophy, and introduce a research framework that does not start with terms and concepts but considers more fundamental forms of social perception. On the other hand, this chapter explains methodological approaches and evaluation methods and presents the preliminary results of a pretest with a sample of German preschool children.