„Ein Minimum von unabdingbaren erziehungswissenschaftlichen Inhalten und Grundlagenwissen“ – Kerncurricula der Erziehungswissenschaft im Rückblick

This article focuses on the disciplinary society’s recommendations for the design of educational science degree programs as an expression of symbolic boundary work on internal and externally visible disciplinary boundaries. To this end, this article takes a retrospective perspective on the core curricular recommendations for the design of study programs of the German Educational Research Association in the period from 1968 to 2010. It asks what the initial points of the core curricula were, how and what is expressed in the definition of a “core” about disciplinary boundaries, and how these questions are also connected with the study program landscape. Differences between the (changing) core curricula indicate how the balance between openness towards differentiation processes and plural disciplinary perspectives was achieved in the resolutions of a “corpus” of common, disciplinary knowledge.