Christel Adick

Short Biography & Significant Contribution

Christel Adick lectured and researched and held posts at several German universities in the cities of Muenster, Hanover, Siegen, Berlin and Bochum. She was honorary visiting professor at the School of Education, University of the West Indies/Cave Hill (Barbados) and taught courses of Comparative Education in international cooperation projects at the University of Jalalabad (Afghanistan) and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University of Port Elizabeth (South Africa). Besides, she served as an appointed member of several scientific advisory boards in Germany such as the then DSE, i.e. the German Foundation for International Development.

Christel Adick was born in Muenster (Germany) where she also spent her school education and university studies (teacher training, diploma in education). During her high-school times she was an exchange student in the United States and continued to be active in international programs of various youth and student organizations, including exchange programs in Europe between schools and youth organizations, a German youth delegation to Japan, and various international voluntary work camps in India and in several African countries. Not least from these manifold experiences grew her wide interest in international and comparative education which she followed in her profession. Her university career started with assistant teaching and research projects at the University of Muenster in 1973, and continued as a (senior) lecturer at the University of Siegen (1980-1993) until she got the Chair of Comparative Education at the Ruhr-University Bochum (1993) from whence she retired in 2013. The last extended research project in which she participated was both international and interdisciplinary in that it united scholars in Germany and in Mexico from various social sciences. It was funded by the DFG, i.e. the German Research Council (2010-2013) and focused on staff mobility across borders in German and in Mexican for profit vs. non-profit organizations. Christel Adick has supervised a large number of Master theses and many Doctoral theses on a wide range of topics mostly from comparative and international education. She is also known from lectures, panels, workshops and presentations at numerous national and international conferences including activities sponsored by the DAAD, i.e. the German Academic Exchange Service. She acts as a reviewer for various German and international academic journals, as prominently for the International Review of Education. Furthermore, she has participated in programs of international cooperation in Higher Education, including an international consortium which operated an international Master of Arts Program on Educational Research and Development in Afghanistan funded by the European Union (2008-2010).

Her academic interests cover both comparative and international topics. From the 1970s onwards Christel Adick was especially interested in education in the newly independent ex-colonial countries outside of Europe. In this respect she reflected the role of European Missionary and Colonial expansion worldwide and co-authored a unique collection of annotated and commented archival documents on German Missionary and Colonial Education in Africa featuring the German colonial times between 1884 and 1914. At the end of the 1980s she was among the first in German academia to discuss the relevance of macro-perspective theories of world development for Comparative and International Education, in particular the world polity approach (by J.W. Meyer et al.) and the world system analysis (by I. Wallerstein et al.). Her seminal work on the universalisation of modern schooling (1992) figured as a starting point for her increased interest in the challenges of ‘globalisation’ for national education systems and for international educational policies. Since the turn of the century her research interests encompass transnational education spaces and organisations, which in her writings are paradigmatically distinguished from international (in the sense of inter-governmental) and national education spaces and organisations. This includes a special focus on different types of educational and policy transfer across borders such as educational export commerce, exchange programs or development cooperation. Her work also covers areas of international and intercultural education including the development of concepts for global education or education for sustainable development. Her Introduction to Comparative Education which was published as a paperback (2008) in a series of foundational literature for university teaching on education is widely referred to in the German speaking academic community. She has also published a good number of articles in English and some in Spanish. In 1997 Christel Adick began to edit a book series focusing on historical-comparative studies on socialization and education, which was relaunched in 2016 together with Marcelo Parreira do Amaral as co-editor, under the bi-lingual title: Sozialisations- und Bildungsforschung: international, komparativ, historisch – Research in Socialisation and Education: international, comparative, historical.

(www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ve/adick; as from Jan-2017)

Educational Background

1966 High School Diploma (the German Abitur)

1966-69 Teacher Training (degree: state certificate)

1969-73 Studies in Educational and Social Sciences; Diploma in Education (Dipl-Päd.)

(including a thesis on Youth organisations in Kenya)

1973-79 Thesis-writing (besides her work as research assistant) for a PhD degree (Dr. phil.); with a thesis on Education and Colonialism in Togo

1992 Habilitation (Inaugural Dissertation to become a University professor) on The universalisation of modern schooling.

Professional Background

Research Assistant in two third party funded empirical research projects at the Institute of Education, University of Münster (1973-1979)
(Senior) Lecturer at the Institute of Education (permanent post), Universität – Gesamthochschule Siegen (1979-1993)
Visiting Professor (appointed) at the Humboldt Universität of Berlin (1992)
Chair of Comparative Education, Institute of Education, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (1993-2013)
Visiting Professor (honorary) at the School of Education, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus/Barbados (1997)
Appointed Member of the Editorial Board of the International Review of Education (2000-2010) at the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning in Hamburg (acting as a consulting editor before and after the appointment)
Elected Member of the Convent (1995-2000) and of the Senate (2006-2013) of the Ruhr University Bochum

Affiliations (associations, organizations, institutions)

German Association of Education (DGfE), active in two commissions: Comparative and International Education, and Administration, Policy and Educational Law
German Association for African Studies (VAD)
Paulo Freire Society in Germany (PFK)
Comparative and International Education Society (CIES)

Selected Publications

In English

Adick, C./Gandlgruber, B./Maletzky, M./Pries, L. (Eds.) (2014): Cross-Border Staff Mobility. A Comparative Study of Profit and Non-Profit-Organisations. Houndmills/Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave MacMillan Publishers Ltd. 2014 [ISBN 978-1-137-40439-8]

Adick, C. (2016): German Foreign Cultural and Educational Policy as a Means of Soft Power. In: HERJ. Hungarian Educational Research Journal (Debrecen University Press, Hungary), Vol. 6 (2016), No. 3, pp. 11-22 [http://herj.lib.unideb.hu; DOI: 10.14413/herj.2016.03.02.]

Adick, C./ Giesemann, M. (2015): The relevance of German political foundations for comparative educational research. In: JER. Journal of Education and Research (Kathmandu Unversity, School of Education), 7 (2015), No. 1, pp. 7-24 [also online: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jer.v5i1.13055] [ISSN: 2091-0118] [ISSN: 2091-0118]

International Cooperation in Higher Education: A Master Programme in Educational Research and Development in Afghanistan 2008-2010. Christel Adick, Holger Daun, Pia Karlsson, Amir Mansory, Mahesh Parajuli, Tuomas Takala (Eds.). Kabul: Swedish Committee for Afghanistan 2011 [ISBN 978-91-86936-35-8]

Adick, C. (2011): A Century Ago: the First and Only Large Scale Education Survey in the German Colonial Empire (1911): In: Tertium Comparationis, 17 (2011), No. 2, pp. 96-107 [ISSN: 0947-9732]

Adick, C. (2008): Transnational Organisations in Education. In: Pries, L. (Ed.): Rethinking Transnationalism. The Meso-link of organisations. New York etc. 2008, pp. 126-154 [ISBN: 10: 0-415-46789-6]

Adick, C. (2002): The Didactics of global education: a tool for combining the international and intercultural dimensions of education. In: Audigier, F./Bottani, N. (Eds.): Education et vivre ensemble. Actes du colloque la problématique du vivre ensemble dans les curricula/Learning to live together and curricular content. Geneva (SRED) 2002, pp. 239-262

Adick, C. (2002): Demanded and feared: transnational convergencies in national educational systems and their (expectable) effects. In: European Educational Research Journal, 1 (2002), No. 2, pp. 214-233

Adick, C. (1992): Modern Education in "Non-Western" Societies in the Light of the World Systems Approach in Comparative Education. In: International Review of Education, 38 (1992), 3, pp. 241-255

Adick, C. (1989): Education in the Modern World System. An attempt to End the Mythology of the Concept of Education as a Colonial Heritage. In: Education, 40 (1989), pp. 30-48. Reprint in: Indian Journal of Community Guidance Service, 7 (1990), No.3, pp. 1-24 (original text in German: 1988; Spanish version 1989/ reprint 1993).

In German

Bildungsentwicklungen und Schulsysteme in Afrika, Asien, Lateinamerika und Karibik, Christel Adick (Editor) Münster etc.: Waxmann 2013 [ISBN 978-3-8309-2785-3]

Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft. Eine Einführung, Christel Adick (Author), Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2008. [ISBN: 978-3-17-018858-7]

Deutsche Missions- und Kolonialpädagogik in Dokumenten. Eine kommentierte Quellensammlung aus den Afrikabeständen deutschsprachiger Archive 1884-1914. Christel Adick und Wolfgang Mehnert unter Mitarbeit von Thea Christiani. Frankfurt a.M.: IKO 2001 [ISBN 3-88939-237-7]. Open Access URL: http://www.pedocs.de/volltexte/2016/11694

Die Universalisierung der modernen Schule. Eine theoretische Problemskizze zur Erklärung der weltweiten Verbreitung der modernen Schule in den letzten 200 Jahren mit Fallstudien aus Westafrika. Christel Adick (Author). Paderborn: Schöningh 1992 [ISBN 3-50674-019-9]

Bildung und Kolonialismus in Togo - Eine Studie zu den Entstehungszusammenhängen eines europäisch geprägten Bildungswesens in Afrika am Beispiel Togos 1850 - 1914 (Reihe DIPF: Studien zu Gesellschaft und Bildung, Bd. 6). Christel Adick (Author). Weinheim: Beltz 1981 [ISBN 3-40765-306-9]

Created: 2017-03-14

Contributed By: Prof. Dr. Sabine Hornberg, Technical University (TU) Dortmund, Germany