In the past years we have dealt with the relationship between Didactics and Subject-Specific Didactics as well as with the commonalities and differences between different subject didactics (the latter especially in Istanbul). Several times we came across central issues like that of didactics (understood as instruction or teaching/learning) in relation to education/Bildung/éducation – without being able to deal with those issues in more depth, given the time constraints for a normal symposium. Similarly, questions like relating different subjects to one another as objects of teaching and learning AND defining the relative contribution of individual domains or subject areas like math, the natural sciences or the social sciences for the personal and intellectual development of young or adolescent learners in terms of their overall education or Bildung could not be discussed yet and had to be postponed.

All of these questions involve very complex issues, of course, yet they should begin or continued to be addressed within the network 27 on the next ECER conference in Porto. Therefore, an extended symposium is suggested to pick some of these issues in a more systematic way. The symposium would have two parts of 90 minutes each.

The topic or focus of this part I will be conceptual in that it would try and clarify the basic claims in connection with the terms Didactics, the Russian obuchenie (Learning/Teaching), Bildung, Instruction and Éducation as well as evaluate some of the general assumptions and implications involved. In particular, one would have to relate and compare different schools of thinking and research traditions concerning their explicit or implicit findings or positions taken vis-à-vis the topics and concepts mentioned. These schools and traditions are related to different cultural contexts. This part of the symposium will thus draw upon presentations of representatives within the German setting, from the Francophone world as well as from the Russian tradition. Central notions for thinking about school ad its function in society are presented and they are then discussed from the point of view of didactics: what is their meaning for didactics? How are they used? Inversely: how are didactics defined by them?

In contrasting three apparently very different ways of looking at fundamental dimensions of schooling, the symposium aims first at simply informing about culturally contrasted conceptions in Europe; second, at defining what is really different and what is common, with the hypothesis that there are fundamentally convergent dimensions; thirdly, to better understand the what didactics is or can be in relation to constituting notions about school in different cultures. The discussion of the three papers will play a central role in the symposium that is as starting point for deeper understanding and future common work.