Douglas Yacek ist Senior Lecturer in Ethik und Multikulturalismus und lebt seit sechs Jahren in Deutschland. Sein Ziel ist es, Bildung so zu gestalten, dass sie mehr tut, als nur Wissen zu vermitteln – sie soll das Leben der Schüler bereichern und eine tiefere Verbindung zur Welt schaffen.
In seinem TEDx Talk zeigt er, wie Leidenschaft und Engagement das Klassenzimmer in einen Ort der Transformation verwandeln können. Sein Aufruf: Lasst uns die Bildung von morgen gemeinsam gestalten – es beginnt mit der nächsten Unterrichtsstunde.
© Drew Chambers
- Please write five lines about yourself – what do you do in life, what life path have you taken, what are you proud of?
Douglas Yacek is a Senior Lecturer of Ethics and Multiculturalism at the University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration in North Rhine-Westphalia and a Research Fellow in Educational Foundations at the TU Dortmund University in Germany. At the heart of his research and teaching is the question: How can teachers make education transformative? How can we awaken students‘ fascination for subject matter, inspire a love of learning, and help young people lead morally good, politically engaged and personally meaningful lives? What methods work, and don’t work in K-12 and college classrooms? In 2021, Yacek was awarded the TU Dortmund prize for excellence in teaching. He now regularly gives talks and workshops for teachers and educational leaders around the Europe and the US on central issues of educational practice. - What do you consider the most important in your life (not just in your professional sphere)?
My most important achievement in life was making my first friend in Germany. That may not sound like much, but it was a sign that my German language skills — I moved to Germany only just six years ago — were just good enough to have all of those important moments of intimacy, shared life and exchange that belong to friendship. - The motto of this year’s TEDxStuttgart is „Change Is Now?!“ Education is one of the most conservative spheres of life, it is highly regulated by state norms and in general.
What can be done to make the education sector react faster to the challenges of modernity?
Education is a unique domain of life because it performs two, sometimes contrary functions — it must preserve and pass on what we hold dear in our society, but it must also prepare young people for the new challenges that the future will bring. If teachers and schools are to address the problems of modernity in the right way, they have to balance these two essential functions. Sometimes this means „reacting fast“ — keeping up with the latest social developments and creating methods of learning and curriculum that are dynamic, innovative and flexible. But sometimes this means also resisting becoming distracted by modern trends and novelty for their own sake. It means creating an environment where young people are introduced to mathematics, history, literature and science in a way that enriches their experience of the world today, and not always sacrificing the current moment to the spectre of modern challenges. - What can one person do to transform education? What are you personally doing?
Transforming education begins with the teacher — more specifically, it begins with the teacher’s next lesson. The biggest problem facing education today is how to engage the young people sitting in our classrooms, immersed as they are in profoundly stimulating and sensational digital content. How could the Pythagorean Theorem ever compete with a 15 second TikTok dance sequence? The answer to that question lies in the teacher who dares to be impassioned by what she is teaching and who designs her lessons and courses to be radically oriented to awakening the fascination and wonder of her students. - What will you be talking about at the TEDxStuttgart conference? Please formulate it as a classic Tweet in 140 characters.
Here are three options:
1) What do the best teachers do to engage and inspire their students? The answer is simpler than you may think: They dare to transform their students.
2) What makes a great teacher, a great school, a great educational system? One word: transformation.
3) What is the key to transforming education today? Making the classroom a space for transformation. - Why do you believe this is an idea worth spreading (TED motto)?
How actionable is it for our listeners, what will they be able to do?
Making education a transformative endeavor is an idea worth spreading because we tend to think about education as a matter of equipping students with what we think they „need“. We want to prepare students for their later vocations and the challenges of modernity; we want to provide them with knowledge and the competencies that they can use to be successful. This mantra of „provide and prepare“ as ubiquitous in education as it is one-sided. We are missing the transformative potential of education, its power to dramatically enrich the quality, depth and meaning of our experience.
This message is clearly actionable in educational contexts, where teachers can begin tomorrow accentuating the intrinsic value and meaning of their subject matter for their students‘ lives. But it is also applicable in any context in which there is teaching taking place — in presentations, brown-bag lunch exchanges, or even with friends. The idea of transformative education urges us to focus on what really matters in our message — its enduring capacity to make our shared lives better, more just and more worth living.