Michael Steinmetz

Michael Steinmetz is a Professor of German Language and Literature and their Didactics with a focus on Literature Didactics at the Weingarten University of Education since 2020. Previously, he served as Acting Professor at the same institution in 2019. His academic journey includes research assistant positions at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (2009-2013) and Justus Liebig University Giessen (2014-2019), where he completed his habilitation in German Literature Didactics.

Steinmetz's research focuses on the theory of literary understanding, text competencies, educational standards, empirical task research, and material-supported writing. His teaching emphasizes literature science and didactics, support in literature classrooms, learning and performance tasks in German instruction, reading competence, reading diagnostics, and poetry education. His work bridges theoretical foundations with practical classroom applications, particularly in developing effective methods for literary comprehension.

His recent publications show a strong emphasis on dialogic teaching approaches in literature classrooms, perspective understanding in literary texts, and the integration of modern technologies in literary education. The research demonstrates consistent development from foundational work on educational standards to current investigations of classroom dialogue quality and perspective understanding, with increasing focus on empirical validation of teaching methods.

• Doctoral Prize of the Faculty of Philosophy at Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Steinmetz leads two major research projects: S-GeföLit (Support in Conversational Literature Teaching) in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Scherf and Dr. Marco Magirius, and PAuLi (Perspective and Tasks in Literature Teaching) with Prof. Ricarda Freudenberg, PD Dr. Birgit Schlachter, and Dr. Martina von Heynitz. Both projects employ design research methodology to develop and test teaching arrangements for literature instruction. The S-GeföLit project focuses on modeling support as a central quality aspect of teacher behavior in literature-related classroom discussions, while PAuLi aims to structure the learning field of "perspective understanding" through iterative development and testing of teaching materials.