New professor in Karlsruhe: Torrau brings a breath of fresh air to political science!

New professor in Karlsruhe: Torrau brings a breath of fresh air to political science!

At the beginning of March 2025, the Karlsruhe University of Education (PHKA) has gained a new professor for political science and didactics: Prof. Dr. Soren Torrau. He is also the new head of the Institute for Political Science at the PHKA. Torrau's research interests include human rights education, democracy education, and political education and communication in the digital world. This step marks an important advance in the academic landscape of political education in Germany, especially in the tense digital turning point of our time.

Torrau's academic career began at the University of Hamburg, where he received his doctorate with a dissertation on the formation of knowledge through presentations. He had previously studied social sciences and German for teaching at high schools and taught politics and German at a local school. Its central educational approach aims to enable teachers to prepare children and young people for the digital society. Torrau emphasizes the need for orientation and reflective knowledge in an increasingly complex, digital world.

Innovative training for teachers

From 2020 to 2025, Torrau was junior professor for didactics of social studies/politics and society at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. During this time he developed a 1.5-day training program on the topic of “News Literacy”. This offer enables teachers to slip into the role of students and thus design digital learning environments themselves. From autumn 2023, this training program will be offered in Karlsruhe under his supervision.

The concept of digital democracy education is becoming increasingly important, especially through initiatives by organizations such as Das NETTZ, a networking center against hate speech. Luisa Schmidt, scientific advisor at Das NETTZ, emphasizes how important digital civil courage is in political education. The NETTZ specifically promotes the impact of education in the digital space in order to enable responsible participation in political life. Young people not only need to be news literate, but also able to handle personal data and platform logic.

Focus on digital democracy education

Luisa Schmidt and her colleagues recently published a guide on evaluation methods for impact-oriented digital political education. Digital democracy education not only addresses the dissemination of knowledge, but also the challenges associated with hate content and manipulation techniques on the Internet. It aims to empower marginalized groups and include them in the discourse.

Another goal is to create digital togetherness, which is designed through real-life approaches such as online gaming and social media. Digital formats and principles of outreach social work, such as “digital streetwork”, transfer social dialogues to the digital world and offer new opportunities for participation. However, these initiatives face the challenge of ensuring access to target groups while collecting relevant and concise evaluation data.

Despite the clear challenges arising from the overlap between educational logics and commercial platforms, Schmidt encourages practitioners in digital democracy education to experiment and actively incorporate young people's feedback into the educational process.

The connection between digital and analog formats can make a decisive contribution to the effective evaluation of educational projects. By actively involving young people in the design of these educational measures, sustainable and effective democracy education can be promoted.