Kersten Reich

Kersten Reich (born August 14, 1948, in Hamburg) is a German educator and cultural theorist. He was Professor of General Pedagogy from 1979 to 2006 and Professor of International Learning Research at the University of Cologne from 2007 to 2017.

Career Reich studied art and political science with a state examination for teaching as well as main studies in psychology, education, and philosophy. He achieved his PhD at TU Berlin in 1976. His dissertation Theories of Teaching discussed German concepts of teaching. He completed his habilitation in 1978 with a thesis on Philosophy of Education and Knowledge Theories. He occupied his first full professorship in 1979.

Research work Kersten Reich became known in pedagogy with his dissertation Theories of Teaching in the 1970s. In a comparison of the prevailing instructional schools in Germany, he criticized in particular the insufficient orientation towards a comprehensive understanding of the psychology of learning. In his habilitation thesis, a turn toward Erlangen constructivism is evident. In the 1990s, he founded interactionist constructivism. This approach is understood as a socioculturally oriented constructivism, which in particular is connected with John Dewey's pragmatism. Reich also founded the Cologne Dewey Center in direct cooperation with the American Dewey Center. Together with Jim Garrison and Stefan Neubert, he has published two fundamental works on "John Dewey's Philosophy of Education" and on "Democracy and Education reconsidered".

In 1998 Reich's main work on interactionist constructivism "Die Ordnung der Blicke" was published in two volumes. In an engagement with currents of recent epistemological criticism, he argues why constructivists should not only rely on observer theories, but must always consider the role of participants and agents in their interactive context.

The 2012 work "Inklusion und Bildungsgerechtigkeit" and 2013's "Chancengerechtigkeit und Kapitalformen," which also appeared in English in 2018, comprehensively address educational disadvantages in both the German and international education and teacher training systems. Reich expands Bourdieu's theory of forms of capital by elaborating the added value of forms of capital like "body capital" and "learning capital."

He has published more than 120 essays, including e.g., articles in English on the relationship between constructivism and pragmatism, on interactionist constructivism and education, on the roles of observers, participants, and agents in discources, on questions of language construction, on the social as an inclusive idea, on the connection between Berger & Luckmann (social constructivism) with Dewey's constructivist pragmatism, on Zygmunt Bauman with Stefan Neubert.