Didactics meet classroom studies

Kirsti Klette

pp. 101-114

in: Meinert A. Meyer, Manfred Prenzel, Stéphanie Hellekamps (eds), Perspektiven der Didaktik, Wiesbaden, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009

Abstract

Didactics offers a rationale and a conceptual structure for interpreting, understanding, classifying and framing educational purposes and practices. In relation to schools, it focuses on the what (content), the who (teachers and students) and the how (methods of teaching and learning). However, the author argues that didactics has not fulfilled its potential as an integrative and ordering theory and that it has not made adequate use of empirical classroom research (from cognitive psychology/learning theory on the one hand and subject-matter didactics on the other). Besides, didactics has not come up to a change of research from teaching and teachers to learning and student research. The author underlines her evaluation with reference to the Anglo-American and the Nordic tradition. She finds positive development in the field, e.g. a change to process models in teacher research, a shift from content analysis in the German Didaktik tradition (Wolfgang Klafki's "Bildung") to domain-specific research. She deplores that we still know very little about how students' learning is influenced by differences in teaching activities. The author welcomes a methodological development in classroom research towards rich observation with a variety of research instruments and suggests that didactics as a core discipline should live up to its potential in the future.