Katrin Schultze

Dr. Katrin Schultze is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of English Language Education within the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. She completed her PhD in English Language Education at the same institution in March 2017 and has been actively engaged in research and teaching since then.

Her research focuses on argumentative competences in foreign language classrooms, particularly through debating as a method for democratic citizenship education. She examines cooperative teaching in multilingual EFL classrooms, professional identities of language teachers, and employs qualitative research methodologies including grounded theory and narrative inquiry. Her current work is closely tied to the 'Join the Debate!' school development project (2022-2025) which aims to establish foreign language debating across Berlin schools.

Dr. Schultze's publications reflect her interest in the intersection of language education and democratic citizenship, with recent work examining foreign language debating as a method of cultural learning and democracy education in subject didactics. Her research addresses contemporary societal challenges including fake news and political extremism through the lens of argumentation skills development.

She teaches multiple courses related to foreign language teacher education, including 'Inclusion and Heterogeneity in English Language Teaching,' 'Issues in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning,' and 'Perspectives on Foreign Language Didactic Research' across various teacher education programs at Humboldt University.

As project coordinator for both the current 'Join the Debate!' initiative and the previously completed Erasmus+ project ENROPE (2018-2021), Dr. Schultze demonstrates strong leadership in educational research projects focused on plurilingualism, teacher development, and democratic education through language learning.