Historical Practice of School, Instruction and Education
The research area focusing on the history of instructional and educational practice comprises projects that target the analysis of transformation in school and (subject-specific) instructional practices since Enlightenment.
The Research Area in Detail
Based on fundamental insights into the social and structural history of school, practice-theoretically motivated research at the BBF renders a cultural historical account of pedagogical institutions. The empirical studies are grounded in the assumption that the transformation of instruction and schools can be better assessed and understood by focusing on practical actions and deeds of the historical actors on site.
Practices are subject to historically specific contexts. They may vary depending on institutional and human resource conditions, and they change these conditions themselves. For example, they play a constitutive role in teacher professionalization or for aspects that determine modern subject didactics after a certain historical developmental phase. Pedagogical practices are reconstructed in historical comparisons, drawing on different sources. For example, this concerns teaching practices, practices of showing, exam practices, disciplinary or punishing practices. Continuities and longer-term transformations can thus be revealed but it is also possible to discern discontinuities in the development of pedagogical cultures and forms of institutionalization. In this regard, for instance, the development of different modes of grouping students into school classes has been studied. Current contributions focus on the knowledge about historical foundations of school examination procedures or research on the history of subject didactics and school subjects, contents of taught subjects and knowledge at school.
Selected Introductory Articles
Reh, Sabine/Scholz, Joachim (2012): Schülerzeitungen der 1950er und 1960er Jahre als schulkulturelle Artefakte. In: Casale, Rita/König, Gudrun M./Priem, Karin (Hrsg.): Die Materialität der Erziehung: kulturelle und soziale Aspekte pädagogischer Objekte. Weinheim: Beltz, S. 105-123. (Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, Beiheft; 58). (Online URN: urn:nbn:de:0111-opus-72014).
Ricken, Norbert/Reh, Sabine (2017): Prüfungen – Systematische Perspektiven der Geschichte einer pädagogischen Praxis. Einführung in den Thementeil. In: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, Jg. 63, H. 3, S. 247-259. (Online: DOI 10.3262/ZP1703247).