Dr. Kerstin TE HEESEN

Research topics: Teacher Training, History of Education, Visual Studies, Knowledge Acquisition, Cultural History

Kerstin te Heesen is a post-doctoral researcher in the field of primary school teacher training in the Institute Teaching and Learning. Trained both in the fields of History of Education and Adult Education, her research has been situated in the field of Social and Cultural History of Education with an emphasis on the Visual and Media History of Education guided by the question how knowledge is acquired.

More recently, she has focused on developing trainings for primary school teachers. In this scope, she combines her expert knowledge in analysing visual sources and their relevance for educational purposes as well as her background in methodologies of knowledge acquisition and adapts this to the context of teaching and learning in primary schools.

After her doctorate in Educational Sciences at the Ruhr-University Bochum, focusing on the media history of adult education (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Wittpoth), and positions as research associate at the University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd and Augsburg University, Kerstin te Heesen was scientific collaborator at the University of Luxembourg in the University-funded project “The Renewal of the Family: Formative Representations in Portraits and Genre Paintings from the 16th to the 19th Century”, supervised by Prof. Dr. Karin Priem (2011 – 2015).

In 2017, she returned to the University of Luxembourg and joined Prof. Dr. Christina Siry and her team at the Science Teacher Resource Center (SciTeach Center). Since January 2019 she is project coordinator of the latest project of the SciTeach team, entitled Sci2School (Science Teaching to Support Children Learning Science), a PSP flagship project funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), that aims to promote the teaching of science in Luxembourg’s primary schools, through contextualized resources and pedagogical support.