Shedding the content: semantics of teaching burdened by didactic formalisms

ABSTRACT

The paper argues that what is left behind in the current era of accountability is the educational content. The authors present shedding the content as the great challenge of teaching and learning in today’s schools. They turn to the tradition of Bildung and outline the theoretical background for the content-focused approach to (research on) teaching and learning. Their approach is based on analyses of authentic (real-life) teaching and learning situations. The paper highlights how didactic case studies can be used to generalize the findings across individual cases. Within the multiple case studies, 44 didactic case studies were reanalysed to identify didactic formalisms, i.e. problems in the semantic and logical structure of educational content, which corrupt the quality of instruction. Two specific types of didactic formalism are described in detail; stolen cognition and concealed cognition. Stolen cognition prevents cognitive activation of students when the teacher over-reduces the space allowed for the students’ cognitive work with the content, concealed cognition are instances of purposeless cognitive activation of students due to their being disconnected from the content.

KEYWORDS:

• Case studies
• course content
• learning
• teaching
• educational practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The studies deal with teaching and learning in kindergartens (2) and in primary schools (12) while the majority focus on different subjects at secondary schools; the fields include foreign languages (7), Czech language and literature (7), mathematics (5), physics and chemistry (4), biology (7), history and civics (6), psychology (2), geography (15), arts and crafts (10), physical education (4) and others.

2. A learning environment is a field where inter-subjective collaboration between a teacher and learners takes place, which provides learners with opportunities for learning and is created by communicating and sharing learning content (van Dijk & Kattmann, 2007).

3. Individual case studies are referred to as e.g. CS_25, meaning case study number twenty-five.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [GA15-05122S].

Notes on contributors

Tomáš Janík

Tomáš Janík is an associate professor of education and the Head of the Institute for research in school education, Faculty of Education, Masaryk University. His professional interests lie in educational reforms, teacher professionalization, curriculum, and teaching and learning.

Jan Slavík

Jan Slavík is an associate professor of education at the Department of Art Culture, Faculty of Education, University of West Bohemia. His professional interests centre on art education, philosophy of education and the theory of didactics.

Petr Najvar

Petr Najvar is an associate professor of education at the Institute for Research in School Education, Faculty of Education, Masaryk University. He focuses on the general issues of educational research, teacher expertise and developing knowledge base for teaching.

Marcela Janíková

Marcela Janíková is a research assistant at the Department of Sport Pedagogy, Faculty of Sport Studies, Masaryk University. Her professional interests lie in curriculum and teaching and learning.