Teaching As A Reflective Practice

The German Didaktik Tradition

Ian Westbury, Stefan Hopmann, Kurt Riquarts, Ian Westbury, Stefan Hopmann, Kurt Riquarts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136601705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume presents a mix of translations of classical and modern papers from the German Didaktik tradition, newly prepared essays by German scholars and practitioners writing from within the tradition, and interpretive essays by U.S. scholars. It brings this tradition, which virtually dominated German curricular thought and teacher education until the 1960s when American curriculum theory entered Germany--and which is now experiencing a renaissance--to the English-speaking world, where it has been essentially unknown. The intent is to capture in one volume the core (at least) of the tradition of Didaktik and to communicate its potential relevance to English-language curricularists and teacher educators. It introduces a theoretical tradition which, although very different in almost every respect from those we know, offers a set of approaches that suggest ways of thinking about problems of reflection on curricular and teaching praxis (the core focus of the tradition) which the editors believe are accessible to North American readers--with appropriate "translation." These ways of thinking and related praxis are very relevant to notions such as reflective teaching and the discourse on teachers as professionals. By raising the possibility that the "new" tradition of Didaktik can be highly suggestive for thinking through issues related to a number of central ideas within contemporary discourse--and for exploring the implications of these ideas for both teacher education and for a curriculum theory appropriate to these new contexts for theorizing, this book opens up a gold mine of theoretical and practical possibilities.

Part
I

Didaktik as a Reflective Practice

Chapter
1

Teaching as a Reflective Practice: What might Didaktik Teach Curriculum?

Ian Westbury

Ian Westbury is a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is general editor of the Journal of Curriculum Studies.

How learning is organized, how it is perceived, how issues about it are debated are always rooted in the particularities of national histories, of national habits, and national aspirations.

–W. A. Reid (1998)

As Stefan Hopmann and Kurt Riquarts note in their Introduction to this volume, Didaktik is a tradition of thinking about teaching and learning that is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Although the core of this volume is taken up with texts from Didaktik, intended to introduce readers to this tradition in its own words, we also argue in the pages that follow, implicitly if not explicitly, that this German tradition of curricular and pedagogical thought is worth the sustained and serious attention of those who work within the “Anglo-Saxon”—as our European colleagues phrase it—educational and curriculum traditions. We argue that Didaktik provides ways of thinking that highlight some very important, and universal, educational questions that are not well defined in the English-language curriculum tradition. In addition, we propose that Didaktik suggests ways of thinking about, and some practical approaches to, some of the core tasks of preservice and inservice education of teachers, which many recognize are not being well handled in American teacher education. In this introductory chapter to this volume, I sketch one version of the case that I have asserted in these sentences and, at the same time, seek to outline a framework for reading the chapters that follow.

But is it possible that there are ways of discussing the curriculum and teacher education that are different from those we Anglo-Saxons know and that our ways of thinking about the curriculum, and our practice of teacher education, might learn from? Hopmann and Riquarts outline a case for this difference in their Introduction to this volume. However, Wolfgang Klafki (1995; see also chaps. 5 and 8, this volume), one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars in the Didaktik tradition, has suggested that curriculum, that is, American curriculum theory, and Didaktik are not far apart, not least because they are concerned with the same set of issues:

• Teaching and learning goals.

• The topics and contents that follow.

• Organizational forms and teaching and learning methods and procedures.

• Teaching and learning media.

• Prerequisites, disturbing factors, and unintentional auxiliary effects.

• The ways in which learning results and forms can be controlled and evaluated.

One implication of this kind of listing is that Didaktik can be more or less straightforwardly assimilated to the categories of English-language curriculum theory. I, on the other hand, argue here, with Hopmann and Riquarts, that, although Didaktik and curriculum theory do address similar issues or topics, there are fundamental differences in the ways in which traditional American curriculum theory and Didaktik have posed, and then sought to answer, the questions that flow from these topics. These differences provide, if nothing else, directions for elaboration within the curriculum tradition. In addition, there is a body of issues that are addressed within the Didaktik framework that are simply not asked within the curriculum tradition—but are very important. Didaktik also has highly developed (and highly usable) approaches to the education of teachers that flow from its starting points that are also not found in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of teacher education. It is these features of Didaktik, and the different way of thinking about curriculum that they represent that makes this German tradition of educational thought so interesting for Anglo-Saxons. But what are these differences, and why do they occur?

In the American case, the dominant idea animating the curriculum tradition has been organizational, focusing on the task of building systems of schools that have as an important part of their overall organizational framework a “curriculum-as-manual,” containing the templates for coverage and methods that are seen as guiding, directing, or controlling a school’s, or a school system’s, day-by-day classroom work. These manuals replicate, in place after place, the somewhat open categories of the national, institutional curriculum; but, it is seen as a major responsibility and task of each school system to decide, for itself and after appropriate public deliberation, what the larger national curriculum means for this place in the light of its circumstances. The resulting curricula are sometimes progressive in spirit and sometimes not so progressive, but that difference is not essential. What is essential is the idea that public control of the schools means that, whatever the character of the curriculum that is developed for a school or school system, teachers as employees of the school system have been, and are, expected to “implement” their system’s curricula—albeit with verve and spirit—just as a system’s business officials are expected to implement a system’s accounting procedures or pilots are expected to follow their airline’s rules governing what they should do (see Westbury, 1994). Teachers are, to use Clandinin and Connelly’s (1992) apt metaphor, seen as more or less passive “conduits” of the system’s or district’s curriculum decisions. Curriculum as a field of study within American education has traditionally sought to address, and to prescribe for, the problems involved in developing and implementing curricula seen in this way.

In the German case, on the other hand, the state’s curriculum making has not been seen as something that could or should explicitly direct a teacher’s work. Indeed, teachers are guaranteed professional autonomy, “freedom to teach,” without control by a curriculum in the American sense. The state curriculum, the Lehrplan, does lay out prescribed content for teaching; but, this content is understood as an authoritative selection from cultural traditions that can only become educative as it is interpreted and given life by teachers—who are seen, in their turn, as normatively directed by the elusive concept of Bildung, or formation, and by the ways of thinking found in the “art” of Didaktik.

Thus, Didaktik is centered on the forms of reasoning about teaching appropriate for an autonomous professional teacher who has complete freedom within the framework of the Lehrplan to develop his or her own approaches to teaching. Didaktik, as a system for thinking about the problems of the curriculum, is not centered on the task of directing and managing the work of system of schools or of selecting a curriculum for this school or this district. Instead Didaktik, as Wallin (1998) put it, provides teachers with ways of considering the essential what, how, and why questions around their teaching of their students in their classrooms. These are, of course, the core issues that are the heart of a reflective practice of teaching! Within Didaktik the range of possible answers to these questions is further elaborated to become, in turn, frameworks for structuring, and sometimes assessing, the larger rationales teachers have for their classroom work. The centrality Didaktik gives to such rationales for teacher thinking reflects its starting point that every teacher must, necessarily, assume a role as reflective educational (and curriculum) theorist in order to teach anything, anywhere. Table 1.1 spells out these core assumptions of the German Didaktik and contrasts them with the core assumptions of the Anglo-Saxon curriculum tradition.

Table 1.1
Didaktik and Curriculum Compared

Level	Curriculum	Didaktik
1. Lesson Planning
core question	how	what and why
content as	object	example
aims as	task	goal (direction)
lesson plan as	course action	frames of reference
teaching as	enactment	licensed
2. Research
focus	individual teacher	art of teaching, Didaktik
	teacher thinking	analysis (hermeneutic)
	(interpretative)
assessment of	student achievement	professional
successful teaching	(scores & standing)	appropriateness,
		reflection
3. Theory
function	preparation	initiation
sequence	subject matter comes first	Bildung comes first

Note. From Hopmann and Riquarts (1995). Copyright (c) 1995 by Institut für die Pädagogik der Naturwissenschaften (IPN). Adapted by permission.

As I have suggested, it is these starting points around Didaktik, and the ways in which they are elaborated and worked out in relation to the idea of Bildung, that makes this tradition so interesting to those from outside its northern and middle European worlds. Didaktik offers ways of thinking about issues that have been, to this point, barely identified, and certainly not elaborated, in American educational theory. We argue in this volume that a better-developed relationship between curriculum and Didaktik would promise a great deal for Anglo-Saxon educational theory, curriculum studies, and teacher education. However, seeing the promise of Didaktik takes work—because, as Reid (1998) pointed out, the Didaktik tradition, like the curriculum tradition, is rooted in the particularities of a national history, national habits, and national aspirations.

In the balance of this chapter, I explore these claims—and, in so doing, frame this book—by, first, offering interpretations of the “traditional” Anglo-Saxon curriculum theory and Didaktik individually as ideal-types, and then comparing them. I conclude by outlining a framework that offers a way of seeing the constructive relationship between the two traditions that we need—when we come to know each other better.

Curriculum Theory and Research

For American students, the world that education should help to create is presented as objectified. … The social and cultural world is [seen as] an objective structure. … The task of curriculum [is] to present this structure to students, and help them determine what place they will occupy in it. The premises behind such reasoning are, firstly, that culture and society can be rendered in facts to be learned and, secondly, that, for students, the question of how they are to relate to society and culture is one that they have complete freedom to answer for themselves. (Reid, 1998, p. 13)

If we start our analysis by staying close to the practical curriculum work found in the world of American schools, all of the essential elements of curriculum studies can still be readily described within the framework outlined in the core text of the field, Ralph Tyler’s (1949) Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, that is, the Tyler Rationale.¹ In the text of the Rationale, but also in the nested national-to-local praxis it symbolizes, there are two distinct themes and several subthemes; and although these aspects of curriculum thinking are generally seen as fused, they reflect different strands in American curriculum theory—and become different issues in practice.

First, there is the assumption that Reid (1998) identified, that the world that the school seeks to reflect is objective and can be “rendered into facts to be learned” (p. 13)—an assumption that leads inevitably to (and at the same time is a result of) a managerial framework for, first, curriculum development and specification and, later, for the control and evaluation of the effectiveness of educational “service delivery.” The core curriculum technologies of planning, objective writing, instruction, test development, and curriculum evaluation follow from the larger framework.

This structure is seen as rational in that it is assumed that it is possible to specify a set of orderly steps setting out how an optimal curriculum can be developed. In the Rationale, this rationality is value-neutral and framed by the steps of assessing (a) subect-matters and the “needs” of students and society and (b) screening what emerges from this analysis by way of a normative and a psychological analysis. The conclusions of such analyses provide the basis from which the goals of a school can emerge, which are in turn transformed into courses and units with their behavioral ob...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Didaktik as a Reflective Practice
• Part II: Bildung: Didaktik's Central Idea
• Part III: Sources from the Didaktik Tradition
• Part IV: Didaktik as Praxis
• Author Index
• Subject Index