Doing family education between experience-based exchange and science-based intervention. Participant observation on family education in Germany

Abstract

Family education encompasses a wide range of professional intervention programmes and presents diverse organisational forms in different countries. In Germany, it is anchored in the Social Code VIII and positioned in an intermediate space between the family – the central conjunctive space of experience – and society. Based on qualitative empirical material, conducted and analysed using the documentary method of interpretation, the following article provides insights into a research project on family education in Germany. In addressing the question of the inherent nature of the practice of family education, this article employs the heuristic of (un)doing family education to describe the fundamental pedagogical modes of family education in the sense of exploratory research.