Meinert A. Meyer
"Beyond Fragmentation - Opening the European Space for Didactics, Learning and
Teaching"
Abstract
"Didactics in Europe has its origin in the epochal works of Jan Amos Comenius, but over
the centuries, it has become a national enterprise. We should therefore try to find back to
the common roots and to explicate the differences in order to profit from the comparison
and to establish networks of communication on teaching and learning."
"Didactics in Europe has its origin in the epochal works of Jan Amos
Comenius. The present-day relevance of his didactical programme will be
shown in the first section of the presentation. The second section will deal
with the fact that over the centuries, didactics has become a national
enterprise. This will be shown with respect to the German tradition, focusing
on Wolfgang Klafki, Lothar Klingberg and Bildungsgang didactics which is
my own field of research. A short look at French and Russian didactics will
be added. And it will be shown that and why didactics did not develop as a
higher education discipline in the English speaking countries. This will
allow, in the third section, to explicate the justification, the perspectives and
the challenges of "unification" of research and teacher education in a
European network of cooperation. On this basis the common features and the
differences between the European countries can be identified. Thus
describing German didactics profits from a description of what didacticians
in the other European countries do. And the look beyond the fence should
not be restricted to Europe. The Chinese didactical landscape, for example, is
quite different from what we find in Europe, as will be shown in the fourth
section. The so-called didactic triangle will then be used to identify the
basics of didactics. It will be shown what the present-day problems of
German didactics (general and subject didactics) are thus shedding new light
on the basics. The comparison can help understanding the European
landscape, and this will profit from reflections on what the Germans call
"Bildung". An explication of this didactical concept will be the objective of
section five. In the sixth and last section, I will show that a focus on the
process of Bildung can help identifying what may be of interest in most of
the European countries, including Hungary. developmental task concept and
the concept of sense construction in order to show that the variety of sense
constructions produced in the European countries for the justification of
educational activities can be appreciated as a good foundation for the attempt
to establish a Europe without fragmentation, in didactics."