Comparative studies of manners of teaching (original) (raw)

2010

Abstract

The ambition with this presentation is to create possibilities for studying and make comparisons of teaching between subjects and teaching traditions within different cultural settings. This is important because didactic competence depends on the existence of alternatives, in this case, alternative ways of teaching, or alternative manners of teaching. Alternatives make choices necessary and visible and the need for justification arise. In order to fulfil these ambitions we will present a way of analysing teachers’ manners of teaching. This method for analysis contains two steps: analyses of epistemological moves and analyses of curriculum emphases. The theoretical background for the analyses is pragmatism, the work of late Wittgenstein and discourse theory. By identifying different manners of teaching possibilities are created to discuss what counts as teaching, teaching science in this case. Using analyses of epistemological moves and curriculum emphases for identifying different manners of teaching have several advantages. Firstly, the epistemological dimension is part of all teaching. This makes comparisons between teaching in different subjects possible. Secondly, analyses of curriculum emphases have been used in order to create knowledge about educational discourses and its historical transformation within different subjects. Thereby it becomes possible to highlight the potential connections between manners of teaching and educational discourses which are important when making comparisons between different manners of teaching within different cultural settings. Thirdly, by using epistemological moves analysis as the basic analytic tool, the problem of theoretical overdetermination is avoided, i.e. that categories are forced upon the empirical material.

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