Powerful educational knowledge through Subject Didactics and General Subject Didactics. Recent developments in German-speaking countries

ABSTRACT

This contribution will outline the development of a specific approach of theoretical educational thinking in Germany, associated with the notions of Didaktik/didactics and Fachdidaktik/subject-matter didactics as well as its comparative, generalized form called General Subject Didactics (GSD). The first one deals with the ‘art and science of teaching’ in general, whereas the second and third one relate to disciplines of subject-matter teaching and learning in school.

We will start with analysing didactics being in a crisis, leading to the strengthening of subject didactics in its place. Yet subject didactics has its own limitations and weaknesses. We will argue that these can be overcome with the help of General Subject Didactics which observes, compares and analyses the different subject didactics from a higher point of view: this approach can help understand the educational practice of one specific subject better and deeper, but also help moving beyond particular experiences and boundaries within that framework, towards looking at neighbouring subjects, at cross-curricular networking and cooperation. We will demonstrate how this might support the development of a powerful educational knowledge base for specialized subject teachers and their practice as educators as well as for continued professional development.

KEYWORDS:

• Didactics
• subject-matter didactics
• general subject didactics
• subject-didactic knowledge
• subject-didactic thinking

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express gratitude for the continuing cooperation of his colleagues Ulf Abraham, Horst Bayrhuber, Volker Frederking, Werner Jank and Martin Rothgangel within our research project “General Subject Didactics”, funded by the Association for Fachdidaktik, Germany, and acknowledge their support. Where appropriate, individual contributions will be identified.

The author is particularly grateful to Martin Rothgangel and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and for having commented critically upon an earlier version of this contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See also Meyer & Meyer, 2007 and the English translations of Klafki, 1995, 2000.

2. The first approach is represented by Klafki (e.g. 1996), the second one by Heimann, Otto & Schulz (1965). For an update on the many competing models see Jank & Meyer, 2011 (new ed. in 2021).

3. This was one of the immediate reasons for the establishment of General Subject Didactics (see below): In that sense, GSD assumes a task that was or is insufficiently performed by general didactics as a branch of educational research.

4. But even Terhart has to acknowledge that didactic theory has not changed for years, if not decades, that the ties to empirical classroom research are not really established and the relationship with subject didactics left open (2019, p. 219).

5. The term ‘pedagogy’ is used here equal to general didactics. As an academic discipline within the educational sciences, it normally covers more ground and addresses more issues of education than “didactics’; it relates to schooling in the wider sense. (For the dynamic relationship between SD and the educational sciences see Cramer & Schreiber, 2018).

6. It should be critically noted, however, that the empirical methods applied here are mainly qualitative and ‘judgemental’ (Zierer & Wernke, 2013).

7. In Germany, teachers are normally trained for two specific content areas, they will become specialized in defined areas of knowledge, their professional identity is largely coined by being experts for teaching this specific school subject and thus for limited aspects of reality. This is even true for other than (upper) secondary school teachers, although to a lesser extent. Primary school teachers, for example, have to choose out of the basic subject areas (one instead of two: mother-tongue, maths, foreign language) plus a more general curriculum area within the primary school setting.

8. School subjects have developed over the years as units of organization and of the curriculum; they are ‘the socio-historical form of the modern school system’ (Schneuwly, 2018), continually developing, partly in contradictory ways. The divisions between school subjects can easily be imagined to be different from what they are nowadays. But the very fact that they exist, reflects the need for structuring the world and dealing with reality in more or less systematic, rational ways, acknowledging different ‘rationalities’, however.

9. The terms didactics or subject didactics are not a genuine idiomatic concepts within the English language or its academic culture. As a matter of fact, they are hardly used, but largely absent within the Anglo-Saxon world (Hopmann, 2007; Westbury, 2000). We are aware that the notion didactic is even somewhat negatively connotated in the Anglo-American space as merely instructive, strategic or even morally prescriptive (cf. several respected dictionaries). Yet we need common terms for international exchange about these fields of study (cf. Willbergh, 2016).

10. We cannot elaborate on the concept of subject-based Bildung as a central category of goal orientation in SD within this limited article, although it was brought up in the many self-reports as well; but see Frederking & Bayrhuber, 2017; Schneuwly & Vollmer, 2018; Bayrhuber & Frederking, 2019; Vollmer, to appear, as well as the planned Volume 3 in the series ‘Allgemeine Fachdidaktik’ of the German Association for Fachdidaktik (to appear 2022). For understanding the modern use of Bildung and its fuzzy nature see Horlacher (2017).

11. A translation of selected contributions from Volume 1 and 2 of GSD into English is already under way.

12. These measurement models are based on dimensions embedded in the approach of Shulman (1986, 1987) and his concept of ‘Pedagogical Content Knowledge’ (PCK). This notion was translated into German by educational scientists and some didacticians as ‘Fachdidaktisches Wissen’, which in turn was re-translated into English as ‘Subject-didactic Knowledge’ (SDK). In order to distinguish our own more fundamental, wider and more precise understanding of subject-didactic knowledge in connection with GSD, we would have to operationalize it differently in the future (see also the results of a systematic comparison of PCK and subject-didactic knowledge in connection with GSD; Bayrhuber & Frederking, 2019).

13. The notion of knowledge is used here in an extended way, comprising factual knowledge, but also procedural knowledge and epistemic quality (Hudson, 2019) as well as applied or transformational knowledge and the ability to reflect and act on existing knowledge (cf. Furlong & Whitty, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gesellschaft fuer Fachdidaktik (GFD), Germany [AG Allgemeine Fachdidaktik].

Notes on contributors

Helmut Johannes Vollmer

Helmut Johannes Vollmer is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, where he taught English (as a foreign language) and English linguistics, but also applied linguistics and subject didactics (TEFL). Earlier positions were at the Universities of Bremen and Leipzig as well as in England and the US. His research interests include pragma-linguistics, discourse analysis, bilingualism and bilingual education as well as subject-matter didactics. He directed the Research Center for Bilingual Education and Multilingualism in Osnabrück. He published widely in Germany/Europe and North America (over 230 titles) - his latest co-edited books were On the way towards General Subject Didactics and Learning within and Beyond Subjects (both in German, both with Waxmann 2017, 2021). He was the co-founder of the German Association of Foreign Language Research, of the Association for Fachdidaktik and also of two peer-reviewed journals, namely,: Zeitschrift für Fremdsprachenforschung (ZFF) and Research in Subject-Matter Teaching and Learning (RISTAL).