Reducing Fragmentation in University Pre-Service Teacher Education

We report insights from a design research study in higher education that aims at overcoming pre-service teachers’ experiences of fragmentation in their educational programmes. The design approach started from the assumption that fragmentation could be reduced by initiating and conducting boundary crossing between practices in subject matter and subject matter didactics courses at university. Following this assumption, the design principle of boundary crossing by design(ing) for interlinking subject matter and subject matter didactics (domain-specific pedagogy) was implemented in two subjects in pre-service teacher education at university, one in mathematics and one in English language teaching. The linking between subject matter and subject matter didactics we strive for is two-fold: On the one hand, it requires curricular and organisational dovetailing of the courses involved (boundary crossing by design); on the other hand, it requires a study space where students are urged to try to interlink the courses’ contents in their thinking and acting (boundary crossing by designing). Following this design principle, a nested design approach is developed in which students’ designs of teaching practice is interlocked with the design of courses at university level. In this paper, we illustrate two kinds of findings by empirical examples: a conditional model for the intertwined realisation of the two types of linking, and interlinking strategies as heuristics for the pre-service teachers’ thinking and acting.

FALKE: Experiences From Transdisciplinary Educational Research by Fourteen Disciplines

This article details how the FALKE research project (Fachspezifische Lehrerkompetenzen im Erklären; Engl.: subject-specific teacher competency in explaining) integrates 14 heterogeneous disciplines in order to empirically examine the didactic quality of teacher explanations in eleven school subjects by bringing together trans-, multi-, and interdisciplinary perspectives. In order to illustrate the academic landscape of the FALKE project we briefly outline the nature of the transdisciplinary German “Fachdidaktiken” (Engl.: subject-matter didactics, i.e., special academic disciplines of teaching and learning specific school subjects). The FALKE project required the willingness of all researchers from eleven participating subject-matter didactics to rely on both the concepts and the methods of educational sciences as an overarching research framework (transdisciplinary aspect). All researchers of subject-matter didactics had to develop a shared conceptual, methodological, and administrative framework in order to empirically investigate commonalities in and differences between “good explanations” across the range of school subjects represented (multidisciplinary aspect). The additional perspectives of researchers in speech science and linguistics proved fruitful in recognizing rhetorical and linguistic aspects of teacher explanations (interdisciplinary aspect). Data management and statistical analysis were provided by the discipline methods of educational sciences. Rather than reporting empirical results, we here discuss opportunities and challenges as well as the lessons learned from the FALKE project regarding cognitive-epistemic reasoning, communication, and organization.

A Competence-Oriented Approach to Subject-Matter Didactics for Software Engineering

Instructors not only in higher education are regularly faced with the problem that they need to develop a new course or adapt an existing one to changed requirements. This is especially true for topics related to information technology (IT) due to the fast technological progress. Instructors, however, are not prepared really well for this task since they typically have a professional and educational background in areas different from pedagogy. Therefore, some sort of methodological framework to support the systematic development and refinement of courses would be highly appreciated. This paper presents such a model, called Competence-Oriented Subject-Matter Didactics. This didactical theory builds upon several concepts from general didactics, most notably Klafki’s Didactic Analysis, and combines and extends these concepts. As a proof of concept, Competence-Oriented Subject-Matter Didactics is applied to the refinement of an introductory course on information systems. This case study indicates, among other things, that this theoretical model has the potential to be applicable for course (re-)design in other domains beyond IT as well.