In Germany it is often argued, that cosmopolitism should be a general orientation for civic education. Besides this normative claim we know very little about if and how this topic is implemented in civic education contexts. This paper aims to contribute to an answer to these questions by researching the federal educational governance structures in Germany. These structures shape the civic education curricula which are individuated in schoolbooks. Hence the method of qualitative content analysis will be applied on civic education schoolbooks in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. With nearly 18 Million inhabitants, North Rhine-Westphalia is the biggest German federal state. In Germany schoolbooks need to reflect the obligatory curriculum and are authorized by the federal ministries of education.
The qualitative content analysis theoretically draws on the political scientific debate on cosmopolitism. This conceptual knowledge shall then be applied by mapping the argumentative configuration of cosmopolitism in schoolbooks without precluding an explorative strategy. The qualitative research design allows to consider those semantic contexts of meanings that either are not covered by the conceptualizations identified in the literature or only partly refer to these configurations.
Thus the research will focus on the specific content and provide first insights into the overall implementation of concepts of cosmopolitism in schoolbooks. The reconstruction of concepts of cosmopolitism within the respective educational governance structures can be a first contribution to a necessary scientific and political debate on cosmopolitism as a general normative orientation within civic education.
