Wolfgang Menzel (Pedagogue)

Wolfgang Menzel (born June 24, 1935 in Schreiberhau ) is a German Germanist and educator . He is a professor emeritus at the University of Hildesheim .

Career

After studying to be a teacher of German and music at the Braunschweig University of Education , Menzel worked as a teacher at schools in various types of schools from 1960. At the same time as his teaching post he studied pedagogy , German language and literature and philosophy at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen from 1965 and then went back to the University of Education in Braunschweig as an assistant in 1969. Menzel completed his second degree in 1972 with a doctorate. phil .; The topic of his dissertation was German school grammar. In 1974 he was appointed professor for German language and literature and their didactics at the University of Hildesheim . Menzel was Dean of the Department of Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Communication. From 1995 to 1998 Menzel was rector in Hildesheim. He has been an emeritus since 2000.

Research interests and positions

Menzel's main interests are creativity and the promotion of creativity in lessons, action-oriented literature lessons, spelling lessons and learning to write.

Menzel advocates the abolition of learning to write using linked original fonts, commonly referred to as cursive fonts. Proponents of these original scripts for learning to write cite their greater fluency.

Menzel argues on the other hand that so-called "printed matter", if they are written by hand, is not printed but written, not disconnected, but connected by writing movements without a trace on the paper. With increasing fluency, these fonts also developed individually traced connections, i.e. connections of individual letters realized on paper. On the other hand, writings by adults that were perceived as very connected also had a large number of untracked "jumps" between groups of letters, the type of connections was also very individual here.

A font with standardized connections as a starting font when learning to write, such as the Latin starting font , hinders the development of individual movements during the transition between letters as the fluency of the writing progresses. The compulsion not to lift the pen from the paper leads to a cramped writing position. The legibility of so-called "unconnected" fonts is assessed better, and in terms of the speed of execution, they are on a par with "connected" fonts.

Typefaces with standardized connections, in which all letters are connected by traces on the paper, had complicating ornamentation and letters alienated from their original form - as an example Menzel cites the lowercase s of the Latin original script. Writing words in one go was initially a special skill in historical development and only played a subordinate role in legibility.

Menzel emphasizes, however, that when teaching writing with scripts without standardized connections, care must be taken that the spaces between words differ significantly from the spaces between letters within words. Furthermore, attention must be paid to the movement-economical execution of the letters. Smears should be preferred over spreads, and a right-directed movement should be preferred over a left-directed movement.

literature

• Claudia Bullerjahn, Hans Joachim Erwe and Rudolf Weber, (Ed.): Children - Culture. Aesthetic experiences. Aesthetic needs . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 1999, ISBN 978-3-322-95134-2 , p. 273 f.
• Julia Koch: Farewell to grinding-s. Learning researchers and teachers call for the abolition of cursive teaching. Will the decades-long dispute about learning to write come to an end? . In: Der Spiegel No. 1, from January 3, 2011 article in the network
• Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar 2014. 26th edition in 4 volumes. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-030257-8

Web links

• Literature by and about Wolfgang Menzel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Merits for Language and Culture In: Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung from October 20, 1989 Article in the network
2. ↑ Wolfgang Menzel: Plea for a font without standardized connections In: Grundschule aktuell, No. 110, May 2010, pp. 23-25.