Session Information
Contribution
Description: In this paper I will combine personal experiences from different positions held in research and education (insider's positioning) with more intersubjective empiric insights from different subjects fields (outsider's positioning). I will describe narratively and tentatively a possible developmental line over thirty years from the mid 1970s onwards. The paper focuses the growth of 'subject related didaktik' (Norw. fagdidaktikk) in general and Norwegian as a discipline in specific, with a comparative eye on other disciplines and fields.
There are several critical hypotheses involved and evolved. Firstly: the thesis that subject didaktik is mainly a combination of subject knowledge and general didaktik is seen as not valid. Secondly: The growth and professionalisation of 'fagdidaktikk' in Norway and Scandinavia, a process caracterised as 'didaktization', is mainly related to the (outer) crisis of knowledge in society in general, rather than caused by an inner methodological expansion. Thirdly: The growth is politically, professionally and curricularly problematic because it happens between established, competing academic disciplines. Last and fourthly: It fuses a new understanding ("for good and bad") of disciplinarity (Norw. faglighet) and has triggered off a significant increase in interdisciplinary (Norw. flerfaglige) publications that only partly seems to correspond to what happens at the institutional levels, for instance teacher education.
The paper follows tendencies generated by a) a teacher education reform in the early 1970s,
b) the Council of Innovation in Education, c) different programmes initiated by the
Norwegian Research Council during the 1980's. It further draws on experiences from 3-4
projects, focusing disciplinary didaktik in particular, such as the 'European' project EMDID,
(Ongstad et al, 2005) and three local projects, Wholeness in Teacher Education?, The
interdisciplinarity Project, and Coordinated Didaktik in General Teacher Education. It ends
problematising the establishment of new master studies in the fields, especially analysing the
balancing of disciplinary and didaktic aspects.
Some of the main 'ideas' of this paper can be found in a problematisation of subject didaktik
as a research field made for the Norwegian Research Council. A somewhat changed edition of
the final version is found in Ongstad (2004).The main intention with this paper is to search on
a meta level for understandings and perceptions of the fields involved that can help an
international dialogue across Europe. A Nordic initiative to a similar dialogue will be
published (in Scandinavian languages) this June (Ongstad, 2006).
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