TNTEE Publications - Didaktik/Fachdidaktik

The Deutsche Didaktik and the American Research on Teaching
teacher of how to organise the activities when teaching a special subject and choosing the content
within this subject. The new conception of the teaching plan curriculum concentrated on every
pupil and his/her learning.
Thus, the curriculum was defined through the learning experiences, and common to various
definitions was the focus on the individual pupil and the learning experiences which s/he was to
encounter during his/her time at school (cf. Hosford 1973). If we take the broadest meaning of the
curriculum, it consists of all the experiences organised during the time the school is responsible for
the pupil. This also contains, by definition, such experiences which are not consciously planned but
which are happening in the school. Thus, in this case there is no room left for the hidden curriculum
because all the experiences are within the curriculum (cf. Jackson 1992, 4–12.).
Gradually, the meaning of curriculum was broadening and as curriculum theory, its scope was
nearly the same as traditional Didaktik. The word, das Curriculum, was directly taken into use
without any special translation and its content was becoming more and more the same as Didaktik
with a particular emphasis of its own (cf. Frey 1971). Wolfgang Klafki (1974) wrote an article in a
dictionary under the common heading “Curriculum – Didaktik” and it seemed that Didaktik would
be subsumed under the more general curriculum. It was a radical interpretation of traditional Didaktik
and it showed a certain change in thinking about the old subdiscipline of education. It was, however,
only a question of how to compare these two aspects which were parts of the more general Didaktik.
In this article Klafki described the old directions of didactic models and in addition to that, the
aspects of curriculum planning and controlling or evaluation. So one can say that it reflected at least
a different conception of the problems of Didaktik and it had great influence on practical curriculum
development.
The research on curriculum problems concentrating on development, planning, and evaluation grew
greatly during the 1970s and it reached its peak in the early 1980s. The results were reported in
large handbooks (Frey 1975, Hameyer and Frey and Haft 1983): Didaktik and curriculum theory
were considered as parallel areas of the same subdiscipline. During these years the emphasis was
on curriculum theory and it had a very important role in the efforts to achieve school reform, and in
particular in reforming the old teaching plans into a modern curriculum.
It is not easy to define the curriculum, and difficulties arise because curriculum as a concept has
numerous semantic contents and nuances depending on the context in which it is found and on the
purpose for which it is used. Reisse (1975) points out that the term curriculum is strongly culturebound
which is why comparison of its meanings across linguistic boundaries is fraught with a
variety of difficulties. Additionally, of course, any term may also have several meanings within a
specific cultural environment (cf. Connelly and Lantz 1985). The American influence of the
implementation of the term curriculum can be evaluated from the point of view of planning and
evaluation of education in institutes. The problems of formulating educational goals and objectives
as guidelines for teaching practice were focused on, and methods of evaluation, both in the classroom
and on the school level, became more important than before.
The question of the relationship between Didaktik and curriculum has gradually lost its interest and
the status quo seems to have been achieved. The impulses have come from the American research,
but there is hardly any evidence of impulses in the opposite direction. One could conclude that the
didactic aspects of curriculum have integrated into Didaktik. Zimmermann (1986) is of the opinion
that discussion can be reinstated because we now know the good and bad sides of the problem.
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