Franz-Josef Kuhn offers ILAET outstanding experience and expertise in enhancing education around the globe. For over 30 years, he has championed adult literacy, teacher training, school reform, and hands-on pedagogy in developing nations. In 1984, he founded the abc Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Lesen- und Schreibenlernen in der 3. Welt (the abc Society for the Promotion of Learning Reading and Writing in the 3rd World) and he remains its president today. Among its accomplishments, the abc Society built schools for Saraguro Indians in Ecuador, a school for the children of leprosy sufferers in Nepal, schools and a teacher-training centre in Sri Lanka’s Tamil area, and schools in Malawi.
Franz-Josef has developed methods and materials for large, bilingual literacy campaigns that are widely used by indigenous populations in Bolivia and Ecuador. He founded the Teacher Travel Academies that have trained 32,000 teachers in both countries. In 2002, he and CONAIE (the Confederation of the Indian Nations of Ecuador) built and equipped South America’s first Indian university for law, agricultural ecology and pedagogy. Moreover, he has held hundreds of seminars worldwide on a broad range of educational issues.
Franz-Josef also led Spectra-Lehrmittel-Verlag, a publisher of educational materials, and Logo-Lernspielverlag, a manufacturer of educational games, for 36 years as managing director and partner. He has developed, produced and marketed large numbers of learning materials, and created a special method for brain training. In 1995, he founded the Gesellschaft für ganzheitliches Lernen e.V (Society for Holistic Learning) with 50 scientists and educators to offer teacher training in the German-speaking world to spread new scientific and pedagogic discoveries. Since April 2009, Franz-Josef has been the General Agent of The Westermann Publishing Group, which is comprised of 10 prominent educational publishing companies.
