The development-oriented research project is situated within contemporary approaches to professionalisation that conceptualise meta-reflexivity as a core dimension of teachers’ professional identity. It starts from the premise that reflection, reflexivity, and meta-reflexivity are indispensable to professional judgement, pedagogical action, and the formation of a pedagogical-professional ethos. At the same time, research shows that these concepts remain theoretically diffuse across teacher education, curricular discourse, and higher education pedagogy, and are only partially explicated and insufficiently operationalised. This conceptual indeterminacy hinders both the systematic cultivation and the valid assessment of reflexive professionalism.
The project addresses this gap by extending the established focus on reflection and meta-reflexivity through an additional lens: the analysis and shaping of epistemic working relationships in education. It assumes that professional and academic collaboration in schools, higher education, teacher education, and educational research is shaped not only by subject-matter concerns, but also by asymmetries of recognition, visibility, interpretive authority, trust, dissent, and institutional power. These dynamics are treated not as individual difficulties alone, but as manifestations of the social and organisational conditions of professional and academic practice. A viable concept of meta-reflexive professionalisation must therefore integrate personal ethics, social knowledge practices, and institutional order, thereby systematically linking reflection, reflexivity, and meta-reflexivity to social epistemology and the sociology of science.
Against this background, the project pursues two interrelated objectives. First, it investigates empirically which concepts of reflection, reflexivity, and reflective competence are present in the curricula of university colleges of teacher education, among teacher educators, and among student teachers, and how these concepts are currently fostered, rendered visible, and evaluated. Second, it advances the framework of meta-reflexive professionalisation by introducing the dimension of integre Klugheit as a professional-ethical and social-epistemological guiding concept for addressing epistemic conflicts, asymmetries of recognition, and strategic dynamics in educational working relationships.
Within the project, integre Klugheit is conceptualised as a meta-reflexive professional disposition that interprets institutional and social dynamics in hermeneutically informed and realistic ways without lapsing into cynicism, recognises strategic challenges without reproducing manipulative conduct, and links epistemic honesty to responsibility for the conditions of sound knowledge production without naivety toward micropolitical realities. Responsibility thus extends beyond individual conduct to the institutional conditions under which good knowledge can emerge. Philosophically, the concept is developed through a dialogue between theories of profession, the sociology of science, social epistemology, and Christian-informed virtue ethics.
Methodologically, the project is located at the intersection of empirically informed conceptual social research, mixed-methods methodology, and design-based research. Its overall aim is to develop a theoretically robust and practice-oriented concept of meta-reflexive professionalisation that understands reflective competence not only as both a means and an outcome of professional development, but also as a foundation for educational working relationships characterised by integrity and epistemic responsibility.
