Beyond Fragmentation: Mapping the International Landscape on Didactics Teaching and Learning

• In Event: Beyond Fragmentation: Global Perspectives on Didactics—Learning and Teaching

Abstract

We live in a world without peace, full of economic, cultural and political conflict and are confronted with worldwide migration in the light of unrest and civil war. We also experience contingency and uncertainty and at the same time a rapid development of ICT and social media changing the world of today on a global basis. In this situation the development of concepts for learning and teaching seems to be ‘mission impossible’, and yet this work has to be done. Issues of learning and teaching are central to very large areas of common concern for the globalising world, whilst theories and practice of research on learning and teaching vary considerably. While didactics as a university discipline hardly exists in the English speaking countries, it is firmly established on the European continent, in Latin America and elsewhere. Also while didactics is institutionalized as general didactics in many countries of the European continent including the Russian Federation, it exists only as subject didactics in a larger number of countries in Europe, and the differences of course become greater when we bring in the perspective of globalisation. Research on learning and teaching, on instruction and curriculum development is well established, with an open, pragmatic foundation of this research in the progressive tradition based on John Dewey’s centennial work on democracy and education. French speaking researchers tend to focus their work on the description and evaluation of an epistemic process starting with a didactical situation that is based on the transposition of knowledge into the classroom situation. In contrast German-speaking researchers take “Bildung” as the central aim thereby focusing on the subject matter to be taught but also raising central questions about the purposes of Education itself. The differences identified here however, appear to be minimal in comparison to the basic differences between the Western and the Eastern World. In the West, teachers and researchers focus on the self-regulative power of the learning student and identify emancipation as ultimate objective of teaching, whilst teachers and researchers of the Confucian culture states of South-East Asia focus on direct instruction in a strict sense and identify harmony as the ultimate objective of instruction. In this paper we will outline how we aim to approach the task of mapping the international landscape on Didactics – Learning and Teaching and present the initial results of this work.

Authors

• Brian Hudson, University of Sussex

• Meinert A. Meyer, University of Hamburg