Didactics in a Changing World: European Perspectives on Teaching, Learning and the Curriculum

246 Pages·2023·3.764 MB·English

by  Florence Ligozat, Kirsti Klette, Jonas Almqvist

Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Educational Research 6
Florence Ligozat
Kirsti Klette
Jonas Almqvist   Editors
Didactics in
a Changing
World
European Perspectives on Teaching,
Learning and the Curriculum
Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Educational
Research
Volume 6
Series Editor
Dennis Beach, Education, Högskolan i Borås, Borås, Sweden
This book series presents and discusses topical themes of European and international
educational research in the 21st century. It provides educational researchers, policy
makers and practitioners with up-to-date theories, evidence and insights in European
educational research. It captures research findings from different educational
contexts and systems and concentrates on the key contemporary interests in
educational research, such as 21st century learning, new learning environments,
global citizenship and well-being. It approaches these issues from various angles,
including empirical, philosophical, political, critical and theoretical perspectives.
The series brings together authors from across a range of geographical, socio-
political and cultural contexts, and from different academic levels.
The book series works closely with the networks of the European Educational
Research Association. It builds on work and insights that are forged there but also
goes well beyond the EERA scope to embrace a wider range of topics and themes
in an international perspective.
Florence Ligozat • Kirsti Klette • Jonas Almqvist
Editors
Didactics in a Changing
World
European Perspectives on Teaching, Learning
and the Curriculum
Editors
Florence Ligozat Kirsti Klette
Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences Department of Teacher Education and
de l’éducation School Research
Université de Genève University of Oslo
Geneva, Switzerland Oslo, Norway
Jonas Almqvist
Department of Education
Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden
ISSN 2662-6691 ISSN 2662-6705 (electronic)
Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Educational Research
ISBN 978-3-031-20809-6 ISBN 978-3-031-20810-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20810-2
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Foreword
The present book brings together contributions from the main regions of continental
Europe following a call for proposals from the European Educational Research
Association (EERA) Network 27 “Didactics – teaching and learning.” It contributes
to the vital international dialogue among European scholars in the scientific field of
didactics. This field, as the editors remind us in their introduction, is particularly
specific to this part of continental Europe and also to Latin America. There are
many reasons for this, which are undoubtedly to be found in the long history of
pedagogy as an academic field, on the one hand, and in the traditions of teacher
training, especially in secondary education, on the other. The name of the network
itself is already a compromise between two traditions. It was chosen in 2006, during
the founding EERA congress that we organized in Geneva, during which we heard
very contrasting guest lectures by Yves Chevallard, representing the French-
speaking tradition of didactics; Stephan Hopmann, from the Central and Northern
European tradition; and Neil Mercer, coming from the Anglo-Saxon tradition who
did not refer to didactics at all. Since then, several books and special issues, men-
tioned in the introduction, have brought together European didactic researchers. A
journal, aiming at transnational and transdisciplinary dialogue in didactics, Research
in Subject Matter Learning and Teaching (RISTAL), testifies to the growth of the
discipline. These means of scientific communication deepen mutual knowledge
while showing the different national traditions at the same time. For in didactics,
and also generally in educational sciences, more than in other scientific fields, the
local – national, regional, and cultural – anchorage is strong. Besides the fragmenta-
tion mentioned by the editors, between general and subject matter didactics and
between the different subject matter didactics themselves, one can observe local or
national specifications in the way research questions are formulated. They are
indeed determined by local factors, regional and/or national data, or reference
frames. This is unavoidable since the research contexts depend on these factors:
syllabus in one Swiss canton, particular forms of teaching using individualization in
one German region, teaching material in elementary school with its specific con-
tents in Spain, teaching traditions in Norway and more generally Scandinavian
countries, radical change of arts education in Czechia to give but some examples
v
vi Foreword
from the contributions. Reference is also made to didactics in French-speaking (and
even French) educational research, which is different from others. The specifically
didactic core concepts used – be they theoretical or linked to the specific analyzed
context – are essentially local or are often borrowed from scientific fields other than
didactics.
One could conclude that European didactics is not yet really “European.” But let
us look at this the other way round: fragmentation and specification are strengths
under the condition that researchers from different orientations and regions com-
municate and that common viewpoints can be detected: this is what happens in this
book. Indeed, the contributions are united by a common viewpoint defined by what
it means to do research in didactics. What Saussure (1916/1959, p. 8) once said for
linguistics could easily be translated to didactics: “Far from it being the object that
antedates the viewpoint, it would seem that it is the viewpoint that creates the
object.” The object of didactics as a viewpoint is what Chevallard (1997) named
“the didactic” [le didactique], in analogy to the religious, the political, or the eco-
nomic, large social realities that become objects of sciences that adopt a viewpoint.
The didactic as object could be defined as the system formed by teacher(s)-
student(s)-content(s) functioning in a specialized institution that constitutes this
system. “Docere – discere – scire” [teaching – learning – knowing] was the defini-
tion of didactics by its first theorist Comenius. In his approach, “scire,” knowing,
has three modalities: thought, language, and material creation (see Comenius,
1648/2005, p. 159). The entering of “scire” into the didactic system – this is a con-
stitutive condition – is its moving from social contexts where it is used (in science,
in arts, in communication, etc.) into a context where it has to be learned, appropri-
ated in order to transform one’s thought, language, and creation: didactic transposi-
tion. Therefore, the sense and form of the “scire” profoundly changes in the
triangular structure, depending on many factors, among them the kind of institution
(school, museum, university, kindergarten), the characteristics of the media in
which it is embodied (be they games by ludicization in a teaching relation; see
Bonnat et al.),1 and the long history of practices of teachers as a profession to trans-
mit it. Most contributions in this volume adopt this viewpoint and explore empiri-
cally the object that it creates. They analyze how contents are transformed in order
to be taught – in arts education, reading instruction, science education, physical
education, etc. – and when they are taught; what the forms of these transformations
are; and, a much more difficult question, what the eventual explanatory factors of
their transformation could be. Others discuss concepts necessary for doing this
research: the very useful concept “subject didactic knowledge,” much more precise
than the commonly used “pedagogical content knowledge” (Vollmer & Klette), dif-
ferent possibilities for defining a tertium comparationis in order to do comparative
didactics (Ligozat).
Let us look more specifically at the contributions that present empirical data. We
can note that, apart from the general viewpoint just presented, another dimension
1 Names without other details refer to the contributions in the volume.
Foreword vii
unites them. It doesn’t appear explicitly in the papers, but can be reconstructed
through an interpretation of the texts by means of a tertium comparationis. In read-
ing the contributions, one can notice that the authors, more or less explicitly, report
about discrepancies between what was intended or what was expected for teaching
and what was really observed. As for examples, Breidenstein shows, by an ethno-
graphic study, the difference between the officially expected individualized learning
to allow children to be more active resulting in fact in quite strongly routinized
activities with task sheets; Amade-Escot and Verscheure describe a physical educa-
tion teacher, strongly aware of gender biases using teaching practices that repro-
duced gender-oriented habits; and Blikstad-Balas notes a surprisingly low use of
ICT in a highly digitalized society that would or could expect other kind of teaching
practices. Reading the contributions from this particular point of view uncovers
some common – and subtle – dimensions in the texts.
Note that there is necessarily a gap between officially promoted ways of teach-
ing – activity orientation, critical thinking, and gender neutrality – and real teach-
ing, a gap that could be described, in using the terminology of ergonomics, between
prescribed and real labor. This is a very commonly observed phenomenon, here
shown concretely in the domain of teaching. One way of interpreting it is to under-
stand it as the result of sedimentation processes. New approaches and new ways of
teaching never appear on a tabula rasa. They are superimposed on longstanding,
historically evolving practices elaborated by the teaching profession. All the
observed phenomena could be described as the result of such sedimentation pro-
cesses in which one can observe ways of acting coming from different historical
strata that mix together in different forms).2 Let’s take the example of “worksheets”
(as in Breidenstein) in the context of individualization: they appeared in new educa-
tion already in the 1920s (a good example is Dottrens, 1936, inspired by Washburne’s
Winnetka Plan). The gendered nature of physical education is often described in the
long historical run and has indeed a very heavy load in practice (for a recent history
in French-speaking Switzerland, see Czaka, 2021). To analyze current teaching
practices didactically as being the result of sedimentation processes implies know-
ing the history of subject matter teaching as one duty of didactic research.
As one can see, behind an apparent diversity, the didactic viewpoint allows fas-
cinating observations on the system, on the different poles interacting significantly
and transforming each other at every point in processes that depend on many factors
and in different dimensions. These transformations are the core of didactic research
that has to document them in order to understand the real functioning of the system
and its basis, for instance, like in the contributions to this volume, the discrepancy
between prescribed and real teacher labor. One can question the radical postulate
made by one author in the volume that “every form of didactics has a normative and
prescriptive bias in observing classroom activities” (Breidenstein). It is true, how-
ever, that we need didactics that avoids this bias and that analyzes what happens not
so much in terms of absence or deficiency but in an attempt to reconstruct and
2 For the definition and discussion of this concept, see Ronveaux & Schneuwly, 2018
viii Foreword
understand the logic and reason behind teacher and student actions as creative inter-
active processes in a constrained institutional situation.
The common topic in most contributions to this volume, the analysis of teachers’
labor as sedimented practice, has in fact two dominant poles, teacher and knowl-
edge, and a subdominant which is the student in the didactic system. In a certain
sense this is surprising: the function of didactic systems is to transform persons,
students, or, to put it more precisely, to offer opportunities to students, certainly in
constraining situations, by appropriating cultural, semiotic means – concepts, lin-
guistic forms, and material cultural practices – for them to transform themselves.
Students and their development should therefore be a central topic of didactic
research. This is a much more complex question than it seems at first sight since
teaching and development follow very different rhythms. To put it in
Vygotskij’s words:
Teaching and development do not coincide directly, but represent two processes that are in
very complicated interrelations. Teaching is good only when it is the pacemaker of develop-
ment. Then it awakens and calls into being a whole set of functions that are in the stage of
maturation, in the zone of the next development. This is the main role of teaching in devel-
opment (Vygotskij, 1934, p. 275; my translation)
One can, of course, observe immediate learning according to teaching, which is
simpler. But, in fact, development is at stake, i.e., the continuous reorganization of
thinking, speaking, and creating. One way of looking at this from a didactic per-
spective could be to analyze it in the long term of schooling as a possible process of
progression, in order to understand how students develop in different school sub-
jects at different school grades, in a comparative perspective. In playing with the
French word for “subject matter,” namely “discipline scolaire,” one could say that
one has to observe the process of “disciplination” through which students, by appro-
priating the means offered by each school discipline, transform their relationship to
the subject matter and therefore, in fact, to the didactic system itself, continuously
redefining the contract that relates teacher, student, and (knowledge) content. This
could be another field for empirical didactic research to explore.
This book, in bringing together different research traditions in the rapidly evolv-
ing domain of didactics, opens challenging perspectives of debates on central topics
of teaching and learning, among them the ones pointed to in the present foreword.
It constitutes a new cornerstone in the building of a European didactics.
Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l’Éducation Bernard Schneuwly
Université de Genève
Genève, Switzerland
Foreword ix
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