Didaktik and Curriculum in Ongoing Dialogue

Ellen Krogh, Ane Qvortrup, Stefan Ting Graf, Ellen Krogh, Ane Qvortrup, Stefan Ting Graf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000395891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Capital de connaissances

Didaktik and Curriculum in Ongoing Dialogue revives the dialogue between the continental European Didaktik tradition and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of curriculum. It highlights important research findings that bridge cultural differences and argues for a mutual exchange and understanding of ideas.

Through analyses of shared conditions and cultural differences, the book invites a critical stance and continued dialogue on issues of significant importance for the current and future education of children and young people. It combines research at empirical, conceptual, and theoretical levels to shed light on the similarities between the Didaktik and Anglo-Saxon educational traditions, calling for a comprehensive understanding of teaching and a renewed focus on content and knowledge.

Addressing theoretical issues within contemporary educational scholarship, the book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum studies, education theory, and comparative education.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003099390, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I
Contemporary educational discussions within a Didaktik/curriculum frame

Chapter 1
Bringing content back in

Rethinking teaching and teachers

Zongyi Deng

DOI: 10.4324/9781003099390-2

Content – knowledge selected into the curriculum – is an indispensable element in talking and thinking about classroom teaching. In common language, the term ‘teaching’ means the imparting of content or knowledge. In the German Didaktik tradition, teaching is conceptualised by way of the Didaktik triangle – comprised of three general, essential elements: content, teacher, and student. In US curriculum theory, teaching is construed as consisting of four indispensable, and equally important, curriculum commonplaces: subject matter (content), teacher, learner, and milieu (Schwab, 1973).

However, content as a topic of discussion has disappeared from current global policy discourse concerning teaching and teachers. Across the globe, curriculum policy has shifted from a concern with content selection and organisation to a preoccupation with academic standards, learning outcomes, and high-stakes testing (Yates and Collins, 2010; Young, 2009a). Accompanying that shift is a move to depict teaching as focused on promoting students’ academic outcomes measured by high-stakes tests, and teachers as accountable for students’ learning outcomes, through the employment of evidence-based practices (Hopmann, 2008).

The omission of content is also evident in the current popular discourse on teaching and teachers within the academic education community – promoted by a new ‘language of learning’ – a discourse also widely adopted by education policymakers in different parts of the world (Biesta, 2005). In that discourse, teaching is construed as facilitation of learning that is constructivist and learner-centred, and the teacher as one who no longer passes on content (knowledge) to learners but one who supports and facilitates the learning process (Biesta, 2005, 2010).

In the academic literature on teaching and teachers, content is also the least-discussed commonplace. Much of the discussion on teachers has centred on teachers’ characteristics, self-identity, agency, learning, and professional development. Most discourse on teaching has focused on instructional strategies and models, the student–teacher relationship, the context in which teaching takes place (classroom, school, national, international, or global), the social and political nature of teaching, and instructional policy and reform (see Saha and Dworkin, 2009; Biddle, Good and Goodson, 1997). When content is discussed, it is often treated as something to be transferred to or constructed by students, apart from a concern for the broader purpose of education (see Deng, 2018b).

This chapter attempts to reintroduce content into the conversation on teaching and teachers through revisiting the recent work of Michael Young and his colleagues concerning ‘bringing knowledge back in’ (e.g. Young, 2008; Young et al., 2014; Young and Muller, 2015) as well as Bildung-centred Didaktik and Joseph J. Schwab’s curriculum thinking.¹ The recent work of Young and his colleagues is examined because their work has important things to say about teaching and teachers in light of the distinctive function of schooling – the transmission of disciplinary knowledge that students cannot acquire at home. Bildungcentred Didaktik is selected because it provides a sophisticated, elaborate theoretical account of content in relation to education, curriculum planning, and classroom teaching.² This branch of Didaktik is inextricably connected with the rich tradition of European education and Didaktik thinking associated with Kant, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Comenius, Herbart, Dilthey, Nohl, Weniger, and Klafki, among many others. It has a profound impact on the Scandinavian tradition of Didaktik thinking and has been “at the centre of most school teaching and teacher education in Continental Europe” (Hopmann, 2007, p. 109).

Schwab’s curriculum thinking is selected because Schwab is one of the very few US theorists who has provided a well-informed, complex theorical account of the role of knowledge and content in relation to education and curriculum. And his thinking concerning knowledge and content is rooted in and developed out of the rich tradition of curriculum thinking – notably represented by John Dewey (1859–1952), Joseph Schwab (1909–1988), and Ralph Tyler (1902–1984), among others – within the University of Chicago, arguably the birthplace of American curriculum studies. The examination of these three schools of thought, as will be seen, yields an educational, curricular understanding of teaching and teachers that goes far beyond what current policy and academic discourses can capture.

Bringing knowledge back in

Over the last ten years, Michael Young and his colleagues have embarked on a project of ‘bringing knowledge back in’ to the recent global discourse on curriculum policy and practice (e.g. Young, 2008; Young et al., 2014; Young and Muller, 2015). Informed by social realism and based on the works of Émile Durkheim and Basil Bernstein, they develop a social-realist theory of knowledge that differentiates between academic, disciplinary, and everyday knowledge, and, further, between different types of disciplinary knowledge. While reflecting human interests or standpoints, disciplinary knowledge has its own properties, trustfulness, and explanatory power (see Young, 2008). Created by specialist communities of scholars, it is powerful knowledge because it provides the best understanding of the natural and social worlds. The acquisition of this knowledge facilitates the imagining of alternatives, and enables people to move beyond their particular experience (Young and Muller, 2013). As such, disciplinary knowledge is worthy of being taught in its own right and to its own end.

With this theory of knowledge as an essential point of departure, Young and his colleagues argue that the central purpose of schooling is to help students gain access to disciplinary knowledge that they cannot acquire at home (Young, 2009b). Furthermore, access to this knowledge is an entitlement of all students – and (thus) a social justice issue. After all, this purpose is essential if we are to enable the next generations to create new knowledge based on existing knowledge. As will be argued in the last section of this chapter, it imbues the task of teaching and the responsibility of a teacher with intergenerational significance. In this connection, curriculum planning is a process of recontextualising an academic discipline into a school subject – which entails selecting, sequencing, and pacing academic knowledge in view of the coherence of the discipline and the constraints created by the developmental stages of students. The differentiation of different forms of disciplinary knowledge and clarification of their inherent structures provide a necessary basis for curriculum planning that is geared to the effective transmission of disciplinary knowledge (Young, 2013).

Accordingly, teaching is viewed as a process of passing on a body of disciplinary knowledge that students cannot acquire at home. The central task of a teacher is to promote epistemic access to disciplinary knowledge and to take students beyond their existing experience or what they already know (Young et al., 2014). To do this, the teacher needs to interpret the national curriculum to identify what knowledge is powerful for students at different ages, in light of the central purpose of schooling – the why of teaching – with a view to creating educational encounters in the classroom through addressing the how of teaching (means and methods). As such, teachers need to have a theory of the curriculum – a theory of the knowledge students must acquire at various grade levels – in addition to disciplinary knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge (Young et al., 2014).

In short, by way of a social-realist theory of knowledge, Young and his colleagues have contributed to bringing knowledge back into the conversation on teaching and teachers. However, there are two issues. With an exclusive focus on the internal properties and explanatory power of knowledge, they take knowledge as being an end in itself, rather than as a means to some larger purpose of education. They seem to be concerned with, borrowing from David Hamilton, the immediate, present question of “what should they [students] know?”, rather than the future-oriented question of “what should they [students] become?” (Hamilton, 1999, p. 136). Another issue, related to the first, concerns the focus of their discourse – knowledge rather than content. As alluded to earlier, content results from institutional curriculum making – a special selection and organisation of knowledge for the school curriculum – that takes place prior to and independent of classroom teaching (Karmon, 2007; also see Deng, 2009). Such content constitutes the locus of classroom teaching: it frames a teacher’s practice and perspective on teaching (Deng, 2009).

These two issues, overall, have to do with the theoretical underpinnings – sociological rather than curricular and educational – of the work of Young and his colleagues. As I have indicated elsewhere, Young and his associates have ignored two bodies of literature – one on curriculum theory and the other on Didaktik – that examine the role of knowledge and content in education, curriculum making, and classroom teaching from educational and curricular perspectives (Deng, 2015; also see Gericke et al., 2018). As such, they have lost touch with deeper questions about educational purpose, content, and teaching that “have animated pedagogics and didactics” (Hamilton, 1999, p. 136) – and curriculum theory as well.

Bildung-centred Didaktik

Bildung-centred Didaktik provides a theory of teaching and learning pertaining to implementing the state curriculum in the classroom. Central to the theory are the concept of Bildung and a theory of educational content. Standing for the German ideal of (liberal) education, Bildung refers to the formation of the full individual, the cultivation of human powers, sensibility, self-awareness, liberty and freedom, responsibility, and dignity (von Humboldt, 2000; also see Hopmann, 2007). It speaks for “an aesthetic self-understanding with a claim to truth and goodness” (Horlacher, 2012, p. 138). The concept is extended by Klafki (1998) to include the development of self-determination (autonomy), co-determination (participation), and solidarity. Furthermore, Bildung is not limited to any specific group or class in society. Bildung is Allgemeinbildung, or Bildung for all, and applies both to general and vocational education (Klafki, 1998).

Bildung is achieved through linking the self to the world (social and natural) in “the most general, most animated and most unrestrained interplay” (von Humboldt, 2000, p. 58). The world, independent from us, is processed by human thought represented by academic disciplines (Lüth, 2000). With the concept of Bildung as a point of departure, German Didaktikers conceive of the role of disciplinary knowledge in relation to education and curriculum. Knowledge is to be “used in the service of intellectual and moral Bildung” (Lüth, 2000, p. 77), rather than something that is to be gained for its own sake. Academic disciplines are an indispensable resource or vehicle for Bildung (Klafki, 2000). There are several forms of disciplinary knowledge – historical, social, linguistic, geographic, physical, chemical, and biological – each of which gives us access to a particular aspect of reality and each of which has potential to cultivate a particular type of human power and disposition (Weniger, 2000).

Furthermore, German Didaktikers establish a theory of educational content (Theorie der Bildungsinhalte) that serves to inform curriculum planning and classroom teaching for Bildung. It consists of four related concepts: contents of education (Bildungsinhalt), educational substance (Bildungsgehalt), the elemental (das Elementare), and the fundamental (das Fundamentale). The contents embodied in the state curriculum are characteristically called by curriculum designers ‘contents of education’ that result from a deliberative process of selection and organisation of the wealth of the academic knowledge, experience, and wisdom for Bildung:

Curriculum designers assume that these contents, once the children or adolescents have internalized and thus acquired them, will enable the young people to ‘produce a certain order’ (Litt) in themselves and at the same time in their relation to the world, to ‘assume responsibility’ (Weniger), and to cope with the requirements of life. The contents of teaching and learning will represent such order, or possibilities for such order, such responsibilities, inevitable requirements and opportunities.

(Klafki, 2000, p. 150)

In other words, such contents are seen as embodying educational potential – in terms of potential impact on or contribution to self-formation and the development of human powers and dispositions. Furthermore, such potential consists in the educational substance of content comprised by the elemental – the concentrated, reduced content in the form of penetrating cases, concepts, principles, values, etc. The fundamental refers to the ‘primordial’ exper...