Looking into Classrooms

In Germany, as distinct from the countries influenced by the Anglo-American curriculum tradition, the curriculum is seen as a framework by for assisting individual, autonomous teachers' plan for their classrooms. As the body of knowledge within teacher education didactics supports such planning and teaching. As a research tradition, didactics seeks models of teacher thinking and an understandings of the rationales which teachers develop to justify their teaching. Looking into Classrooms: Papers on Didactics, which is written from within the German Didaktik tradition, outlines a view of classroom work as the medium within which the educational formation of students takes place. The book explores some of the ways in which this medium can be understood from the point of view of education - Bildung - rather than from a point of view that sees teaching solely as effective instruction. Looking into Classrooms throws fresh light on what is done in classrooms by asking how the curriculum that is embedded in classroom work contributes to the educational formation of students. Looking into Classrooms offers English-speaking readers a view of a kind of curriculum thinking that is very different from approaches of the Anglo-American tradition. A new world of questions about classrooms, textbooks, and the history of schooling is opened up in ways that throws new light on the questions around English-language curriculum and pedagogical theorizing and research.

PETER MENCK is Professor of Education at the University of Siegen, Germany