Lehrstückunterricht im Horizont der Kulturgenese

The methodology of “Lehrkunst” is based on the three pillars exemplary-genetical-dramaturgical teaching. In this thesis, the genetical teaching which commonly refers to the growth of the individual knowledge of the pupils or of the common knowledge of a group or class extends also to include the genesis of culture and science. The thesis postulates that genetical teaching of natural sciences (especially of physics) is more successful if the composition of the teaching unit (here called the “Lehrstück”) adjusts to the cultural genesis of the specific subject of teaching, that is if the cultural genesis is the baseline of the whole instructional design. The cultural genesis is roughly divided into three paradigmatic epochs (with their corresponding views of the world): the Aristotelic (epoch of anthropocentric worldview), the classical science (epoch of a globalized view) and the modern science (epoch of universal generalization). In our thesis it is argued that the everyday world view of our pupils (and of people in general) is still rooted in the anthropocentric worldview of Aristotle, because it explains physical phenomena in a concrete and demonstrative way – despite all the scientific progress of today’s society. College teaching however claims to convey the classical methods of natural sciences which are driven by the Galilean purification (Deawey) meaning the abstraction from reality, without any connections neither to the anthropocentric point of view nor to the modern universal science theories. Actual modern science once again stands at a different place, based on a yet quite different worldview. In order to address this discrepancy and to close the rift between everyday life (Aristotelic view), school (classical view) and modern science, it is important to go through the cultural history of the subject taught in our lesson units. In the first part of my thesis the “Lehrkunst” didactics are discussed as a didactical method in the context of the current educational landscape. Here I derive my main hypothesis from the “Lehrkunst” didactics and from that of Martin Wagenschein. The second part demonstrates how the integration of cultural history in the design of our teaching unit works, showing it on the basis of three concrete teaching units (“Lehrstücke”) which are called Pascal’s Barometer, (topic air pressure), Galilei’s Law of Gravitation (topic motion) and Fermat’s Mirror Optics (topic light). These three teaching units were enhanced with regard to the thesis of this paper. The hypothesis was not proved in an empirical study, but every lesson was tested on up to a maximum of four classes and the entire performances were documented in detailed lesson reports. In the third part, the thesis is embedded in a general framework of teaching, where I show, why culture based genetic teaching is a fundamental professional and general didactic criterion of good teaching.