NW 27: Teaching and learning in diverse contexts. Didactics, societal demands and individual needs in a changing world

Network
NW 27 Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Title
Teaching and learning in diverse contexts. Didactics, societal demands and individual needs in a changing world

Abstract
This special call in Network 27 highlights the tensions that teachers and students face in the context of rapid societal changes and the emergence of new social and individual needs, especially with regards to diversity. We invite contributions from scholars whose work deals with the integration of political and economic demands, social and individual needs in learning and teaching at all stages of education, and with the impact of these societal requirements on conceptions of didactics and teaching practices.

The Call
This special call in Network 27 highlights the tensions that teachers and students face in the context of rapid societal changes and the emergence of new social and individual needs, especially with regards to diversity. We invite contributions from scholars whose work deals with the integration of political and economic demands, social and individual needs in learning and teaching at all stages of education, and with the impact of these societal requirements on conceptions of didactics and teaching practices.

As didactics is concerned with the interrelation of teachers and students and their interaction on chosen content, we are especially interested in how research and intervention in didactics:

• focuses on teachers and their integration of mainstream themes arising from the debates in society such as nurturing cultural and linguistic diversity; reducing social, gender, ethnic inequities; etc.; their rethinking of contents that were previously presented as "subjects" or “disciplines” in order to integrate complex questions calling for several disciplinary frameworks or social sensitive questions that are dependent of historical, cultural and political contexts; their handling with new requirements in diverse contexts, the problems they raise when it comes to select, plan and assess the curriculum contents;

• takes into account the students as developing selfs with their own interests and fears, their specific developmental tasks in a complex world; the role of students´ views on individual and societal issues and challenges at school, their empowerment to participate in curriculum development and the development of democratic structures concerning classroom interaction, content, and learning objectives; their social status and effects of inclusion and exclusion, of discrimination and injustice at school;
• highlights classroom research which focuses on interaction in class, the choice of topics and curricula by teachers and students, challenges of epistemic quality and joint negotiation of meaning, democratic spaces of reflexion concerning societal demands and individual challenges, beliefs and interests, an intergenerational discourse of topics that matter.

We encourage authors to include reflexions on the tensions due to societal expectations arising in the considered didactics context, for instance:

• tensions between the transmission of a core of subject knowledge and the requirement to address complex problems related to many subjects, and/or socially acute questions in diverse teaching and learning settings;
• tensions between what counts as school knowledge through formal assessment, teaching concepts and diversity in education, the transformation of the students in the encounter with complex problems and societal issues;
• tensions between diverse teachers´ views and students´ standpoints, experiences and developmental tasks regarding societal challenges and issues, and the need of an intergenerational discourse on content being at stake in the classroom.

Since this topic is related to questions that are also discussed in other networks, we will organize joint sessions as far as possible for ECER 2023.

Contact Person(s)

• Marte Blikstad-Balas: marte.blikstad-balas(at)ils.uio.no
• Anke Wegner: wegner(at)uni-trier.de