Political Didactics

The political education is a scientific discipline that as Fachdidaktik the teaching and learning processes for academic and extracurricular political education has as its object. It is not a sub-discipline of education or political science , but an independent discipline. In terms of subject matter, it is related to various subject areas. Political science is central. There is an overlap with the didactics of sociology and economics .

Task and objective

The central task of political didactics is the selection, legitimation and transformation of learning content in political education. In view of the educational challenges and the results of learning psychology, it is not sufficient to just base political teaching and learning processes solely on the basis of teaching methods to determine the content and goals of political education . They must be justified categorically or theoretically and researched empirically. Since the 1950s, when political education first became the subject of political science, political didactics has developed in different directions.

The central educational goal of political didactic work is the political maturity of the learner. The Society for Political Didactics and Political Youth and Adult Education (GPJE) set up competence goals in the course of competence orientation in the German education system in 2004 as follows:

Political judgment
Political capacity to act
Methodical ability

In the meantime, further, scientifically based competence models have been developed.

approaches

The categorical political didactics transformed the political subjects into learning content. Central categories of these political didactic principles are:

the student orientation
the conflict orientation
the problem orientation
Action orientation
the case orientation.

A theoretically based competence model has been developed in the 21st century (Detjen et al. 2012). It describes the subject matter, the ability to judge and act as well as the attitudes and motivations. For political action, various skills such as arguing, judging, evaluating, comparing or problem-solving are required, which are both subject-specific and interdisciplinary. In performance tests, the professional weighing of facts and (evaluative) positions is in the foreground. Here the assessment aspects are tied to the specialist knowledge (Manzel & Weißeno, 2017). The empirical policy didactic competence research serves the theoretical and empirical reconstruction of the respective context-specific performance dispositions. On this basis, the theoretically well-founded model of political competence could be empirically tested and described with a large number of indicators.

Dissemination as an academic discipline

Political didactics is represented by around 40 chairs in teacher training for political education at general and vocational schools at German universities. These are represented in the umbrella organization of the Society for Political Didactics and Political Youth and Adult Education (GPJE). In Austria, where for a long time civic education did not take place in its own subject, but as an interdisciplinary teaching principle, the discipline is not strongly represented academically. In 2017, the Department of Didactics of Political Education was set up at the University of Vienna , the chair is Dirk Lange . The Austrian Society for Political Science has its own section on Political Didactics.

criticism

In the course of the competence debate, German political didactics came under pressure to define its central concepts. Basically, the representatives of a more competence-oriented political education and the representatives of a more pedagogically oriented political education face each other.

literature

Sabine Manzel, & Georg Weißeno : Model of political judgment - a dimension of political competence. In Monika Oberle & Georg Weißeno (Eds.), Political Science and Political Didactics - Theory and Empiricism (pp. 59–86). Wiesbaden: Springer 2017, ( doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-658-07246-9_5 ).
Tim Engartner : Didactics of economics and politics lessons. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-382523318-1 .
Dirk Lange , Volker Reinhardt (Ed.): Basic knowledge of political education. Handbook for social science teaching , 6 volumes, Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, Baltmannsweiler 2010 ( online .)
Joachim Detjen, Peter Massing, Dagmar Richter, Georg Weißeno : Political competence - a model, Wiesbaden, 2012, ( doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-658-00785-0 ).
Wolfgang Sander (Ed.): Handbook Political Education. 4th edition. Newsreel, Schwalbach / Ts. 2014, ISBN 978-389-974852-9 (also series of publications by the Federal Agency for Political Education. Volume 1420).

Siegfried Frech, Dagmar Richter (Hrsg.): Political lesson plan professionally , 2015. Published in the didactic series of the state center for political education Baden-Württemberg ( table of contents, concept ).
Georg Weißeno : Construction of a political didactic theory. In: G. Weißeno & C. Schelle (Eds.): Empirical research in social science subject didactics. Springer, Wiesbaden 2015, pp. 3–20 ( doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-658-06191-3_1 ).