Christian Wiesner

Christian Wiesner studied Communication Science, Pedagogy and Educational Science, as well as Cultural and Social Sciences, at Paris Lodron University of Salzburg. He subsequently worked there as a research associate and lecturer. At the Federal Institute for Educational Research, Innovation and Development of the Austrian School System, he served as Head of Department and Director. Since 2019, he has held the Professorship of Relational and Developmental Pedagogy and Pedagogy of Diversity at the University of Teacher Education Lower Austria. Christian Wiesner teaches at the University of Teacher Education Lower Austria, the University of Vienna, and mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, focusing, among other areas, on diversity, inclusion, special needs education, crisis intervention and support processes, as well as developmental pedagogy.

His research focuses on the phenomenology and phenomenognostics of pedagogy, teaching and learning cultures, developmental psychology and developmental pedagogy, attachment, presence and relational pedagogy, as well as diversity, inclusion, special needs education and transformative learning. His further areas of work include psychoanalytic, psychodynamic and structural-dynamic approaches, mentoring, leadership, methods in the humanities and social sciences, and the pedagogical ethos.

His thinking has been shaped particularly by the works of Franz Brentano, Karl and Charlotte Bühler, Ernst Cassirer, Charles Sanders Peirce, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Heinrich Rombach, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl, Laura Perls, Hilarion Gottfried Petzold and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Together with Michael Gebauer of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and building on research into children’s experiences of nature and concept formation in childhood, Christian Wiesner developed a structural-phenomenological reformulation of attachment theory. As a trained glassblower and glass instrument maker, he combines scientific thinking with illustrative and visual models.