Muhammed Akbulut: "I want to bring science into society"

Are we alone in the universe? Why does hot water freeze faster than cold water? Muhammed Akbulut asks students these and similar questions. There are no clear answers to these unsolved mysteries of science, but this is precisely where their special learning potential lies. Scientific controversies are an example of how science works and that scientific findings are not set in stone. Muhammed Akbulut also wants to awaken young people's interest in science and strengthen their trust in science by engaging with scientific controversies. Trust in science has fallen sharply during the coronavirus pandemic, which he regrets. "We want to counteract this by showing students that science is a very systematic, critical and, above all, self-critical knowledge process. That is very important to me," he emphasizes.

In his experience, he has found that students quickly become enthusiastic when they see how scientific work works. With the didactic concepts that he develops together with his colleagues, he not only helps students to prepare for their pre-scientific work and their studies. For them, academic text competence is also a tool for social participation. "Education is not an end in itself. It's about the larger social dimension," emphasizes Muhammed Akbulut, who will take up a Senior Lecturer position at the University of Graz from autumn 2024. His habilitation project, for which he has received a scholarship from the University of Graz's Habilitation Forum for Didactics and Teaching Research, has also been running on the topic of academic text competence since 2023. He has also acquired a large FWF project in this context, which will enable him to intensify his research work.

Project on multilingualism and language awareness

Muhammed Akbulut ended up in academia by chance. After studying German, psychology and philosophy, he actually wanted to become a teacher. And ended up managing a residential home for asylum seekers in Vienna for four years. "I am very grateful for this experience, because it is grounding to work in such areas. You realize that you are privileged and that there are also people in our society who are not doing so well."

Through a recommendation from his professor, however, he ended up at the University of Landau, where he worked on a project on multilingualism and language awareness from 2014 and also wrote his dissertation on this topic. He remained true to this area of research even after moving to the University of Graz in 2016. Since then, his research areas have expanded to include writing research and the development of text skills in children and young people.

"What we research is so practice-oriented"

What drives him? "I have a great genuine interest in what I'm researching," he emphasizes. Language acquisition research is particularly interesting to him. Because despite all the individuality, language acquisition is not chaotic. "It is very easy to abstract certain phases of development." And he mentions another motivation: "What we research is so relevant to practice. It has nothing to do with an ivory tower. Seeing how pupils flourish in our project and how enthusiastic teachers are about our teaching materials is simply wonderful. We make a contribution to young people's progress at school and to their social impact."

Among other things, he lives out his social vein as an honorary science ambassador for the ÖAD. Several times a year, he visits schools for two lessons to tell children and young people about the everyday life of a researcher. Here, too, his main aim is to arouse enthusiasm and instil confidence in science. "And to bring science into society - into areas that it might not otherwise reach."