Keywords

Introduction

This chapter explores how non-affirmative theory of education and Bildung, representing a theory of general education, may contribute to developing a non-affirmative approach to Bildung-centred school didactics (Uljens, 1997a).Footnote 1 This explorative analysis revisits two earlier studies.

The first study is a textbook in Swedish called ‘Allmän pedagogik’ (General pedagogy, Allgemeine Pädagogik, Uljens, 1998). It was written during a research period at Humboldt University in Berlin, 1996–1997. While it included a first discussion on the relations between school didactics and non-affirmative general education, the volume was mainly a response to the then ongoing erosion of education as an academic discipline. The discipline was increasingly described as an ‘applied field of research’ focusing, for example, learning and teaching while losing sight of understanding the individual’s growth, or Bildung, more broadly. To a lesser degree, education appeared as a discipline for understanding the cultural transformation in terms of a dynamics between generations and for understanding the role of education for identity formation, agency and citizenship in and for culturally and politically plural societies. More generally, my volume on general pedagogy from 1998 reflected upon what kind of theory we could or should develop within the discipline of education, in order for education to operate as a critical discipline for Bildung in a democratic nation state, in relation to sustainability and other global challenges. The book also was a continuation on a long-standing theoretical discussion in Finland, answering the question ‘What is education’? In Finland, such volumes on ‘general pedagogy’ have been appearing on a steady pace every 10–20 years since middle of nineteenth century (Uljens, 2001). In that volume, I introduced Dietrich Benner’s non-affirmative theory in the Nordic countries for critical review, as a possible path for the future. To my mind Benner’s Allgemeine Pädagogik from 1987 conceptualized the modern heritage of education in ways that were plausible. However, despite its international potential, this way of discussing education was, and still is, very much in the margins. Today, when we observe an increasing interest in Bildung globally, one may expect interest for education theory that treats Bildung and education relationally, as argued in non-affirmative education theory.

The second study I revisit, and the main object for this chapter, is School Didactics and Learning (Uljens, 1997a). This study outlined a reflexive theory of didactics. Despite a different terminology, it is obviously reminiscent of the non-affirmative approach, making a closer dialogue inspiring. The reason for choosing the, then odd, expression of school didactics in favour of general didactics was, first, that the ‘learnification’ of society was more than obvious already 30 years ago, in the 1990s. As general didactics obviously did not aim at clarifying teaching and learning elsewhere than in schools, it was, perhaps, not valid across different contexts. A more modest delineation appeared relevant – school didactics.

Further, the situated, everyday and contextual character of learning was very much at the fore in studies by, for example, Barbara Rogoff, Jean Lave, Lucy Suchman, John Seely Brown and many others (Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Suchman, 1987; Brown et al., 1989). Despite this contextual orientation in learning research, these approaches failed in understanding the unique character and task of the school as a site for human cognitive and moral growth, as well as a site for personality development and political citizenship education. Cultural-historical activity theorists (Engeström, 1987) and cultural psychologists (Cole, 1996) were more balanced. In addition, despite the interest in Didaktik as curriculum theory was vivid, in the 1990s theorizing didactics (Didaktik) from the perspective of school as an unique institution for Bildung and education had to be defended, an insight that thankfully has strengthened more recently (Masschelein & Simons, 2013; Biesta, 2019). These later developments support the idea of making school as the point of departure, as was argued in school didactics.

As we will see, despite terminological differences, school didactics and non-affirmative education theory are commensurable. One core reason to the similarities may stem from that school didactics was authored within, and in relation to, an education theory tradition in Finland that has the same nineteenth century roots in modern education classics (e.g. Herder, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Herbart), as has the German non-affirmative line of thought. This relatively strong Hegelian and Herbartian tradition makes Finland stand out compared with the rest of the Nordic countries (Uljens, 2022).

Accepting the school as the point of departure for Didaktik also allows us to organize the numerous perspectives needed for reaching a nuanced conceptualization of how compulsory public education mediate between the private and public sphere. We need to understand the school as a critical, mediating institution, between existing politics and cultural heritage and the learner’s life-world. In this view, educational institutions and educational actors need a relative autonomy. They do not operate totally without outside influence, but nor are they totally subordinated to these influences.

We already observed that while the scope of school didactics is broad, it is not as broad as general didactics. As teaching and learning in modern societies occur throughout life, we expect general didactics (Allgemeine Didaktik) to be valid not only for schools but for teaching and learning regardless of where it occurs. In turn, subject matter didactics (Fachdidaktik) is to its main parts a subfield of school didactics, while some parts of subject matter didactics study the teaching and learning of subject matter in other settings than schools (Uljens & Kullenberg, 2021). School didactics emphasize the institutional perspective, including curriculum policy, governance and Lehrplan as objects for analysis. While school didactics did not develop as curriculum theory, Anglophone readers may well perceive of school didactics as representing curriculum theory. The approach also reminded of the administrative and organizational framing of school teaching, its governance and educational leadership. However, it did not grow out of new institutional or organization theory. Also, taking the point of departure of the school does acknowledge the school’s role in the local society, as a part of the municipal infrastructure crucial for everyday life and the student’s life-world, drawing attention to the relation between education in homes and in schools. Despite such awareness, the main focus centres on conceptually answering two related pedagogical questions: How do we explain pedagogical interaction in schools? How is this interaction related to the school as a reproduction-oriented and transformational institution? School didactics was aimed for understanding teaching in political systems that recognize ateleological globopolitanism, that is, that the future is open and undetermined, yet in need of a global perspective, in addition to a local and nation-state one.

Yet, reaching a pedagogical conceptualization of the school is perhaps more difficult today than before. First, with the expansion and different research specialisations in educational research the past 50 years, attention to a more general idea of human growth (Bildung), including developing a personal identity and autonomy has faded. Cognitive and affective psychological perspectives on learning the subject matter have dominated research on teaching and subject matter didactics, while a conative interest, investigating the education of the will and volition has remained in the margins. In contrast, advocating and promoting ability for self-direction, self-determination and co-determination are core questions in both school didactics and non-affirmative general pedagogy. Second, in many places a competency-oriented curriculum policy has replaced a Bildung-oriented curriculum. Competency-oriented curriculum policies tend to focus generic and performative competencies that transcend specific contents, which clearly differs from a Bildung-centred idea of the school. Third, with an increasing number of researchers from various disciplines studying professional and everyday learning, many seek a foundation for research on teaching in psychological learning theory. However, from learning theory anything reminiscent of theory of teaching or education cannot emerge. Fourth, a global, culturally neoconservative wave has contributed to an interest for subject matter-centred teaching and learning, promoting a traditionalist idea of cultural canon. In many countries, hard core learning of the subject matter itself has become a focal point of interest, leading to losing sight of the broader educative task of teaching subject matter, which is central to non-affirmative theory. Fifth, new advanced digital technology and AI directs attention to new media and learning environments, strengthening an interest to ground education in communication theory. Yet, such theory is of limited use when we want to explain the educative task of schools.

From a non-affirmative school didactics perspective, it is clear that the above disparate developments in education research will not provide us with conceptual tools for dealing with major pedagogical and societal challenges of our time. To meet these needs, this chapter, as the whole volume, operates with the idea that rethinking modern education theory contain a potential too often overlooked in working out conceptual platforms for future. However, revisiting, rethinking and rewriting the modern heritage regarding foundational approaches to education by no means represents an uncritical or nostalgic approach (Sivesind, 2022). While we do not find the answers to today’s problems and future challenges in history, we are equally lost without historical insight. This chapter assumes, following a hermeneutic epistemology, that answers we need, develop in a collaborative and critical contemporary dialogue, across theoretical and cultural traditions and on a global scale.

In order to read school didactics from a non-affirmative education theory perspective, in a first step, I present some of the original features of the school didactic approach. Second, as school didactics was developed in relation to the history of Didaktik in Finland, I shortly sketch the tradition of modern Hegelian and later Herbartian education theory and Didaktik as it developed in Finland. In fact, the historical geopolitical similarities between Prussia and Finland are highly interesting in how they influenced reform of education theory. Third, I describe how empirical phenomenological research on learning and teaching contributed to the development of school didactics in the early 1990s. Already in Uljens (1997a), I discussed the influences from German Didaktik, especially Wolfgang Klafki’s (1994, 1996, 1997) and Paul Heimann’s approaches, why they are not touched upon here. My own connections to German Didaktik at the beginning of the 1990s developed partly in relation to the international comparative project Didaktik meets Curriculum as initiated by Stephan Hopmann and Kurt Riquarts (1995a, b; Westbury et al., 2000). This project brought together researchers like Wolfgang Klafki, Lee Schulman, Klaus Schaller, Peter Menck, Biörg Gundem, Pertti Kansanen, Walter Doyle, Bill Pinar, and many more (Gundem & Hopmann, 1998; Hopmann, 2015; Doyle, 2017; Kansanen, 1995; Kansanen & Uljens, 1995). Recently, Qvortrup et al. (2021) followed up on this program.

In a final step, the chapter demonstrates how school didactics apply and expand on the constitutive and regulative principles identified by Dietrich Benner. In a later chapter in this volume, related to the present one, I reflect, together with Mari Mielityinen, how the principles of summoning of self-activity and Bildsamkeit mediate between different forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. That chapter assumes that pedagogical interventions in the form of summoning of self-activity and related Bildsamkeit mediate transitions from one form of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity to other versions of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity. Here, Bildsamkeit refers, on the one hand, to an anthropological assumption, and, on the other, to the subject’s activity responding to summoning (Uljens, 2001, 2009; Uljens & Kullenberg, 2021).

School Didactics: Features and Influences

The introduction chapter in this volume pointed out some typical questions directing analysis in general education (Allgemeine Pädagogik). Which, then, are the questions a theory of didactics should actualize? Are they the same or different from those in general education? As we will see, both the questions and the answers overlap considerably. Here, I draw on a text-book on Didaktik that I edited in the late 1990’s (Uljens, 1997b). In this volume, one of the very first Swedish translations of Wolfgang Klafki was published among texts by other German and Nordic scholars.

In the German and Nordic Didaktik, it is typical to start the reflection by a discussion of the traditional didactic triangle, consisting of the three poles: teacher, student and content (see e.g. Hopmann, 2007). Throughout history, we may identify a multitude of positions differently emphasizing these poles (teacher, student, contents) and how they are related. Following Hopmann (1997, p. 198ff, 2007) and Künzli (1998), this triangle combines three different, historically developed ideas of teaching. The first is the rhetorical tradition. The rhetorical refers to a tradition of viewing teaching as teachers’ disciplined and ordered presentation of the contents (the discipline) for the student in an ordered or disciplined setting (Hopmann, 2007). Here teaching is informed by thorough knowledge of the subject matter and teacher’s structured presentation of the contents.

The second source to modern Didaktik is the catechetic tradition (Hopmann, 1997). It focuses the teacher and students’ communication. Positions vary according to where the main emphasis is: on the teacher’s ability to lead the learning process by asking content-related questions, thus connecting the contents to learner’s experience, or, on a more dynamic dialogue between the teacher and student. Also this tradition originates in a view of the contents as given, while the interaction between teacher and student is up to the teacher to decide. Compared to the previous content centred notion of teaching, in the catechetic approach students own content related activity is emphasized.

The third axis of the didactic triangle is the relation between the learner and the contents. Also this dimension refers to arranging and structuring the contents into an organized whole, in order to enhance learning. This view acknowledges the selection of contents at different levels of the school system. Teacher’s selection of and preparing the students’ work with the contents aim at helping the student to move beyond her present way of understanding the world, others and herself. The selected contents (Bildungsinhalt) should represent something exemplary, principled insight and knowledge, but its educative quality (Bildungsgehalt) still depends on what meaning it has for the learner’s own work. Such a Bildung-oriented interpretation of this relation clearly gestures towards the learner’s experiential engagement with the contents. Here the student’s own activity, her studying, is central, aiming at a learning that reaches beyond the contents itself. The selected contents must not only be something typical, it must also make sense from the student’s present and future perspective (Klafki). The contents not only serve as an object to be learned. Rather, the selected contents is a medium for educating the learner as a person (e.g. identity, will, solidarity, reflective capacity) and her more general content-related and content-transcending abilities. So, in this Bildung-centred tradition of Didaktik, teaching is not only about supporting the learner to acquire or learn the selected contents as such, but paying attention to in what respects the pedagogical treatment may engage the learner to develop more general capabilities and insights. In a Bildung-centred approach, while these general capabilities are either content-related (e.g. acquiring mathematical, historical, biological ways of reasoning as a result of studying certain occasions of these fields of knowledge) or content-transcending (critical thinking, responsibility, ability to cooperate, self-confidence, moral reasoning), these capabilities never develop as disconnected from the contents. Instead, the content is the necessary medium for critical socialization and education. Thus, in the Bildung tradition, teaching aims not only to student learning about the contents as such, but aims at a learning beyond the contents. Human educative growth (Bildung) is about reflective aquirement of essential features of the culture in order to develop into a coherent and self-reflective, unique individual or person, able to act autonomously out of a reflected will and discerning thought in relation to others’ interests. By utilizing existing knowledge, such educative or non-affirmative teaching also aims at leading the student to the questions that the selected knowledge want to answer. Such teaching opens up for reflecting the questions behind the answers. How do we answer questions? Why are these questions important? Whose interests do they express and serve? By reaching out to the questions behind existing knowledge, teaching enables students to see that one may answer questions differently. In addition, the learner may realize that other questions are more important. In these respects, non-affirmative school didactics represents a Bildung-oriented view of educative teaching. I return to this further on.

In the Scandinavian literature, there is an additional, frequently occurring triangle, with the poles aims, content and method. These poles refer, respectively, to the why, what and how of teaching. Both this and the previous triangle appear in many different shapes in the literature. These triangles are used to identify different historically developed discourses of education, curriculum work and teaching, as we saw above. They also occur as practical schemes or tools used in teacher education to support student teachers’ pedagogical thinking and practicing lesson planning. Both triangles correctly argue that theorizing starts with asking questions, and by pointing out topics to acknowledge.

We may now ask, are these triangles indeed examples of theories in Didaktik? A short answer is a ‘no’. In fact, as we just saw, the triangle with the contents, teacher and student embraces very different schools of thought in the history of teaching. These triangles only point out certain dimensions or questions that a theory of teaching or Didaktik then needs to explain. The non-affirmative school didactic position agrees that these triangles successfully identify important elements and relations, but claims both of them, as such, are limited with respect to the questions raised.

In developing a complementary position, a first step in identifying the object of a theory of didactics, in one sentence, the school didactic approach identified the following questions as crucial. In teaching there is always somebody (who?) that teaches somebody else (whom?) some subject matter (what?) in some way (how?) some time (when?) somewhere (where?) for some reason (why?) towards some goal (which?) (Uljens, 1997a, p. 16). These questions cover the issues raised by both previous types of didactic triangles, focusing either on the teacher, student and the content or focusing the why, how and what of teaching. In addition to these, school didactics pointed out the context or the school as an institution.

Figure 5.1 indicates that the school didactic approach consists of four commonly accepted main components in understanding institutionalized schooling. They refer to (1) intentions, (2) realization and (3) reflection of pedagogical initiatives, at different levels, thereby acknowledging (4) the multiple contexts constituting the framework for pedagogical activity in schools (especially curriculum and evaluation). The visual model thus points out the constitutive elements of pedagogical work (planning, pedagogical process and evaluation). Concerning the context, major distinctions exist between: (1) classroom (learning situation), (2) the school as an organizational context and (3) local society (culture, economy, politics) and (4) the national level, as framing the pedagogical work.

Fig. 5.1
A framework of pedagogical activity in schools. An illustration presents curriculum and evaluation at the district and school levels. A cycle of activity, experience, reflection, pre-understanding, and intention is at the center.

Levels and forms of pedagogical activity according to non-affirmative school didactics. (In Uljens, 1997a)

Full size image

Why ‘School Didactics’?

A closer look at approaches identified as general didactics or general pedagogy demonstrate that they often limit their object of interest to the governance and practice of teaching, studying and learning in schools. In this light, general didactics and general pedagogy are not always very general but limited to school teaching. In such a light, school didactics, in fact turns out as overlapping with the scope of both general education and general didactics, but with restricted validity ambitions. For some, the notion of school pedagogics (German ‘Schulpädagogik’) may appear more accurate (Kansanen, 1997). In Finland, the first textbook in education by Zachris Cleve was Features of school pedagogics. Cleve’s (1884) book covered not only general didactics and subject matter didactics but also school leadership. It is thus revealing that the scope and object of Cleve’s (1884) school pedagogics and school didactics overlap significantly.

Like much subject didactics, school didactics also draws on a Bildung theoretical tradition, where human growth constitutively relates to selected cultural contents. In addition, as theory of Bildung is not limited to theorizing the individual’s growth and self-determination, but also includes questions of aims and contents regarding how we expect school to fulfil its task in an inter- or multi-generational societal and cultural perspective, also makes the concept of Bildung relevant for school didactics.

In the Nordic countries, 25 years ago it was frequent to define didactics (Didaktik), as a science or discipline of teaching and learning. To my mind, such a definition was limited as it downplays the student’s own activity. After all, teaching and studying denote human activities, while learning is something that happens with us, not anything we do. Thus, intentional learning activity translate to ‘studying’, which is what students do in schools. To supplement this delineation of didactics to teaching and learning, I included ‘studying’ between teaching and learning. I wanted to indicate the widely recognized view, that teaching only influences human learning indirectly, mediated by pupils’ and students’ own activity to make sense of the world, others and themselves. Consequently, school didactics was defined as the science of teaching, studying and learning process (T-S-L), (Uljens, 1997a).Footnote 2 The argument was that teaching, in the end, was about designing and organizing study opportunities and activities to engage pupils or students in reinterpreting something, to practice for reaching some performative competence, to find new ways of expressing artistic views or to reflect one’s values and moral reasoning.Footnote 3

Such a view of ‘studying’ as a necessary activity mediating pedagogical influence obviously reminds of Fichte’s original idea of teaching as summoning the Other’s self-activity (Fichte, 2000/1796). This was revealed to me in 1996–1997, when working with Prof. Dietrich Benner in Berlin at Humboldt University.Footnote 4

In non-affirmative education theory, building upon the heritage of original philosophers like Fichte and Herbart, Bildsamkeit is a fundamental human feature. In the literature it refers to human plasticity or capacity to learn but in a sense where the individual simultaneously experiences the world and actively reaches out to it. Bildsamkeit unites the idea of the individual as originally self-active and able to learn from experience. Teaching is then a pedagogical intervention in the subject’s self-directed activity to operate in the world and with the world, to make sense of it, others and herself.

By seeing individuation and socialization as two sides of the subject’s growth into a moral and cultural subject, a societal citizen, and member of humanity, school didactics support what Wolfgang Klafki for his part called a ‘categorical’ theory of Bildung, uniting a so-called material and formal view of Bildung.Footnote 5 In this view, human growth in pedagogical processes presuppose student’s engagement with the subject matter as structured by the teacher, but in a way that aim at developing the learner’s (cap)abilities and the student as a morally reasoning social and cultural being. In this view, the learner’s personal identity and role as a political citizen, ability to act and live with others, given an open future, is crucial.

School didactics identifies teaching, studying and learning in schools in the tension between political, economic, cultural, societal, institutional, private and administrative interests and practices, some of which directly and indirectly influence schools’ work. Expressing the position in the terminology of non-affirmative education theory, the relation between such framing practices and the school is non-linear or non-hierarchical. This means that schools stand in a dynamic relation to these practices, neither being super- or subordinate to politics. Already the first true holder of the professor’s chair in Finland, Z. J. Cleve (1884), strongly recommended politicians not to interfere with education, but to respect the school’s autonomy. In this respect, in a democracy, it is not appropriate that politics turn education into an instrument for narrow-minded and instrumental promotion of disparate interests. As schools in any case are politically directed, political democracies themselves, at the same time, always to some extent reserve pedagogical degrees of freedom for the schools. ‘Political Bildung’ as the promotion of the subject’s ability to reflect critically, and participate and contribute to political life in plural societies (citizenship education), is obviously a central task for schools in political democracies and liberal economies.

Finally, traditional models of didactics seldom explore how various leadership or governing practices contribute to transforming societal interests into pedagogical practice. While didactics typically does recognize the curriculum as a policy document, the curriculum-governing and leadership practices themselves typically remain invisible for didactics (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017). Although the curriculum as a policy document, including its evolvement and implementation, belong to the core questions of didactics and curriculum theory, in Didaktik leadership is rarely considered to mediate collective interests. The school didactic approach consider it relevant not to disregard how educational leadership operate in mediating curricular policies and assessment that regulate teachers’ degrees of freedom. Omitting educational leadership makes it difficult to grasp both how societal interests turn into pedagogical practice and how school development operate (Uljens, 2015). As school didactics intend to conceptualize teaching in schools comprehensively, it included school leadership and governance, at different levels, as necessary for understanding teaching (Uljens, 1997a, p. 86).Footnote 6 Here educational leadership covers a wide sphere of knowledge fields that varies depending on the level of administration. However, at and between any levels, pedagogical dimensions of educational leadership is a core task (Uljens, 2015; Elo & Uljens, 2022).

The Modern Education Theory Heritage in Finland

Given that the school didactic approach was developed both in relation to a Finnish, Nordic and German frame of reference, it is revealing to observe how historical similarities between the 19th century developments of Finnish and German theorizing in education and Didaktik. Understanding similarities regarding these early developments help us to understand the contemporary dialogue. While the school didactic position itself was not founded in a historical or philosophical analysis of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, nor developed in relation to non-affirmative education theory, in retrospect we can see how the early Hegelian tradition of theorizing education in Finland operate as a historical frame of reference for school didactics and its way of understanding the teaching-studying-learning process. The key connection point goes back to Fichte's famous critique of Kant's transcendental idealism. Whereas Kant defended the view that experiential phenomena depend on a priori categories and insight in moral laws, Fichte decentered the individual's autonomy and supreme role by emphasizing the distinction between I and not-I (Ich-Nicht-Ich) (Breazeale & Rockmore, 1996). Such a dualism makes awareness dependent of, but not determined by, the experienced object, while the meaning of this object depends on awareness, but is not totally determined by it. By a kind of dynamic relationalism, Fichte decenters Kantian idealism that overemphasize the subject, but without falling into materialism. Rather, for Fichte self-consciousness is a social phenomenon by assuming that the individual’s consciousness of herself as culturally free depends on others summoning or calling of the self to make use of her potentiality, or in other words, education.

After the Hegelian period 1830–1880 in Finland, the Hegelian legacy (Väyrynen, 1992) no longer operated as an explicit point of reference for theory development in education in Finland, until its indirect revival in terms of new generations of Vygotsky-inspired cultural-historical activity theory in the 1980s (Engeström, 1987, 2016). However, as cultural-historical activity theory ultimately drew on Marxist dialectical materialism, A. A. Laurell’s, J. V. Snellman’s or Z. J. Cleve’s 19th century Hegel-inspired ways of conceptualizing education were not at the fore in these activity theory developments in Finland (Snellman, 1898; Miettinen & Virkkunen, 2021). When the school didactic position developed in the mid-1990s, I was myself not well enough oriented in the Hegelian 19th century heritage in Finland. Thus, it was through my reading of the German education history that the relevance of the tradition in Finland became visible.

There were obvious cultural and political reasons to why Hegelian philosophy was well received in Finland during the nineteenth century. Finland separated from Sweden in 1809 as a result from the Napoleonic wars, and turned into a Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire (Manninen et al., 2021). Despite the incorporation, Finland remained relatively independent, with its own legislation from the Swedish era, a senate of its own and a Lutheran church. This unanticipated ‘existence in between’ the Swedish reign and the Russian Empire, together with influences from Herder and Hegel, offered intellectuals of the time an unprecedented need and possibility for reconstructing a new the idea of humanity, the state, the nation and the individual, as connected to each other by the notion of Bildung. The situation reminded very much of Prussia after the peace in Tilsit in 1807. Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–1881) is the name of the philosopher and later statesman (senator) in Finland that played a key role in this codification process. Snellman’s theory of the state and education, as evolving from the 1840s and onwards (Väyrynen, 1992; Uljens, 2007; Kallio, 2017), demonstrate obvious similarities both with the core idea of Herder’s concept of Bildung and central ideas of non-affirmative education theory, as developed by the German classics (Immonen, 2021). This, together with Herbartian pedagogy that developed in Finland from the 1870s and onwards for many decades, contributed to laying a foundation for a contemporary reception of non-affirmative education theory. Thus, contemporary non-affirmative theory connects to the modern education tradition in reminiscent ways in Germany and Finland.

This modern tradition of education in Finland, in the shape of Hegelianism, dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century through the work of Johan Jacob Tengström (1787–1858), who introduced Hegel in Finland. Later on, Johan Vilhelm Snellman, Johan Jakob Perander and Zachris Cleve, all holders of the first chair of education (‘chair professor of pedagogics and didactics’) established in 1852, contributed to Hegelian philosophy and education theory between 1840 and 1880 (Väyrynen, 1992).

This Hegelian legacy views Bildung in relation to both an individual and a generational dimension of the concept. For Snellman, the purpose of Bildung in an individual perspective is about moving beyond traditional socialisation, by appropriating culture in a reflective and questioning way. Thus, Bildung aims at a reflective and historical awareness, becoming able to continuously reassess one’s experiences and the world (Uljens, 2007). In a generational perspective, Snellman had the view that Bildung starts with learning what previous generations have achieved (memory knowledge), while reaching conceptual knowledge involves evaluation of ‘traditional’ knowing, and its relevance for contemporary conditions. In turn, productive knowing refers to the ability to think beyond what is known – it is about invention of something new. Snellman writes that the ways in which a new generation receives the tradition does not necessarily correspond with how it is passed on to the next generation. Although each generation may overcome and move beyond previous knowledge or a way of life, to view cultural change as development meant, for Snellman, that we ourselves interpret change as development. As such, in history, there exists no inherent objectives or ends. Like Herder, Snellman does not think history has any purpose beyond what humans make out of the future. In this tradition, Bildung denotes a constant becoming on both individual and cultural level. It is an unending process and task. As noted, this becoming does not have any given end it would aim at. Rather, for Snellman, the forming of an end or aim is a part of the process itself (Uljens, 2007). Laurell (1831) had developed similar views earlier.

While Snellman was the philosopher and statesman, he also held the professor’s chair in education during the spring term in 1861 in Helsinki. Zachris Cleve, also Hegelian, was the second holder of the first professor chair of ‘pedagogics and didactics’, established in 1852 at Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki. After having held the chair for more than 20 years, Cleve published a significant textbook, Foundations of school pedagogics in Swedish (‘Grunddrag till skolpedagogik’) in 1884. In this volume, he coherently deals with general didactics, subject didactics, curriculum, school organization and leadership. Emphasizing the autonomy of schools, Cleve clearly reminds of not subordinating the school to family interests, to political or civic interests nor to the church.Footnote 7 This early textbook exemplifies the previously described non-hierarchical approach to understand Bildung, from the perspective of the individual and society. It is worth observing, given today’s differentiated education research, that didactics and school governance is included in one and the same volume on school pedagogics (Ge. Schulpädagogik). School didactics in this chapter obviously is reminiscent of Cleve’s delineation of school pedagogics as a subfield of general pedagogics or education as a discipline.

The connection to German philosophy in Finland continued after the original hegelian period by turning to Herbart, theoretically introduced by Rein (1876), professor in philosophy in Helsinki. Rein interpreted Herbart to represent a version of determinism, downplaying free will. However, Perander (1883) as professor in education, modified this determinist interpretation. Perander clearly understood Herbart’s critique of Kant’s a priori categories of time and space. Perander also argued that Herbart denied education as being about developing predispositions in the form of faculties that would have an existence of their own. The denial of native structuring categories of the mind was, however, not to be interpreted as if Herbart would represent determinism, Perander argued. Instead, following Pestalozzi, Herbart assumed the existence of an active subject, experiencing and operating the world in the form of apperceptions. Therefore, Perander argued, teachers’ task was to summon the learner by pointing at connections between the content as experienced, already existing within the mind of the learner, and the new teaching content.

The reception of Herbart’s ideas in Finland also was aware of Bildsamkeit, and that summoning the learner’s self-activity had an educative intention to it. The development of will and moral character were the most important aims of education. Cruikshank (2022) argues the concept of Bildsamkeit and the idea of education a reflected will was not emphasized in the US reception of Herbart, which was the situation in Finland. Instead, Ziller’s idea of curriculum as a recapitulation of cultural-historical epochs obviously received attention in the USA (Kliebard, 2016). This curricular principle of ‘recapitulation’ is not visible in the Herbart reception in Finland. A little later, the education professor Waldemar Ruin (1887) continued the Herbartian track by analysing the ‘didactical aids for educating human character’, which obviously referred to educative teaching, thereby emphasizing both experiential knowledge and the moral dimensions of, and interest in, participating in social and cultural practice. In turn, Mikael Johnsson (after 1906 Mikael Soininen, 1860–1924), wrote a widely read volume that he characterized as an ‘introduction to the Herbart-Zillerian approach’. Johnsson’s volume from 1895, entitled General Education, focused the three core notions in Herbart’s Didaktik: Regierung, Unterricht and Zucht (Sw. regering, undervisning, tukt) (Johnson, 1895; Soininen, 1911). In two later volumes in didactics, published 1901 and 1906, Johnsson/Soininen connected these general principles of education to curriculum work and teaching in schools. Here, he shortly discussed steps in the teaching process (preparation, presentation, association, generalization and application) as connected to the principle of Bildsamkeit. The aim of education was to awaken and support the learner’s interest in the subjects and to develop the learner’s will (Uljens, 2001). In the present treatment of school didactics, the connections to Herbart’s distinction between social order, teaching and supervision (Regierung, Unterricht and Zucht) is only touched upon indirectly.

During the twentieth century in Finland, influences from Herbartianism continued within teacher education until WWII through Mikael Soininen’s textbooks. Phenomenological and philosophical research by Juho Hollo during the first half of the twentieth century supported this approach (Stormbom, 1986). In addition, Matti Sainio’s studies on Buber in the 1950s and on Herbart’s conception of religion in the 1960s continued the connections to German educational philosophy, but otherwise education research in Finland had started turning empirical from the 1920s and onwards. Albert Lilius took the first steps in this direction in the 1920’s. Matti Koskenniemi’s dissertation from 1936 on the social relations in the classroom, his studies on intelligence and his later project on ‘didactic process analysis’ (DPA) in the period 1960–1970 exemplified a kind of educational empiricism, with clear influences from Tatsachenforshung as promoted by Peter Petersen, whom Koskenniemi visited in Jena 1939 (Mäkinen, 2016). Koskenniemi’s textbooks on didactics, criticizing the individualism he saw Herbart’s pedagogy resulting in, became influential in the post-war period until the 1970s (Koskenniemi, 1971). With the turn towards English-speaking education research at the end of the 1950s, behaviourism and empirical quantitative methods received attention from the 1960s and onwards. Despite a radical expansion of the discipline from the 1970s, with the movement of all teacher education for comprehensive school teachers (Volksschule) to Faculties of Education at the universities in 1974, connections to German Didaktik were almost totally lost, but were revitalized in the 1980s and the 1990s by Pertti Kansanen, Pauli Siljander and others (e.g. Siljander, 2012; Kansanen & Uljens, 1995). However, until introduced by Uljens (1998), Dietrich Benner’s general theory of education remained unknown in the Nordic countries. Since then, the position has received growing attention (e.g. von Oettingen, 2006; Kivelä, 2004; Siljander et al., 2012; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017; Elo & Uljens, 2022).

Phenomenological Research in Teaching and Learning

In addition to the historical framing described above, school didactics drew on four lines of thought in the beginning of the 1990s. The first source was Ference Marton’s empirical-phenomenological research approach ‘phenomenography’ that was later developed into ‘variation theory’ (Marton, 2015). Phenomenography’s empirical research interest was to describe the qualitive variation in student’s conceptions of the teaching content (Marton, 1981; Uljens, 1989, 1992; Marton & Booth, 1997; Ling Lo, 2012). The second source inspiring school didactics was Ulf P. Lundgren’s curriculum research and frame factor theory (Lundgren, 1989). The third influence was Pertti Kansanen’s (1991) studies in didactics and teachers’ pedagogical thinking, and the fourth, Wolfgang Klafki’s critical-constructive didactics and Paul Heimann’s approach.Footnote 8 Of these, I will comment on the phenomenographic approach, because of its centrality in school didactics, and because it obviously gestures towards a Bildung-centred view on school teaching.

Between 1987 and 1992, I spent 3 years in Gothenburg, Sweden, working with Prof. Ference Marton and his colleagues on ‘phenomenography’ (Marton, 1981; Marton & Booth, 1997; Entwistle & Marton, 1994; Uljens, 1989, 1992). Starting in the 1970s, phenomenography became an influential approach in the qualitative research methods movement in education. This research program intended to ‘describe the qualitative variation in how people conceive of their surrounding world’ (Marton, 1981). Marton argued vividly for understanding human learning as a qualitative shift in the learner’s way of understanding some phenomenon, thereby focusing the contents of learning rather than the process, studied by the cognitivists. In phenomenography, learning as a qualitative shift was remotely comparable with radical schema restructuring or scientific revolutions, like moving from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the world. Phenomenography thus avoided the pitfalls of such versions of constructivism, which overemphasizes the learner’s own activity and downplays content and the teacher’s role. The approach also avoided the dilemmas of ‘direct instruction’, that overemphasizes teachers’ role and downplays student’s activity. Rather, phenomenography argued that teaching was about contrasting different conceptions, by identifying similarities and differences in the ‘object of learning’. Thus, the teacher summoned the student’s own experience by asking her to describe how they understood some phenomenon, for example, the different phases of the moon. Not only started the learners to grasp how they themselves understood something, but they also realized that the same phenomenon was understood in a number of different ways. Phenomenography was inspired by Gestalt psychology and reminded of the approach developed by Martin Wagenschein but did never systematically relate to different versions of German Didaktik (Wagenschein & Horton-Krüger, 1999). Today phenomenography is well known around the world. In phenomenographic teaching, an educative effect in itself is that learners realize how differently one occurrence, topic or phenomenon appear for the various participants in a class. Extending this didactic principle of teaching as pointing at contrasting conceptions, it included the view that a constitutive feature of teaching in different school subjects need to highlight the same phenomenon from various perspectives (Marton, 2015).

The phenomenographic position stood in stark opposition with constructivist learning theory that tried to identify those learning and information processing strategies that successful learners were assumed to apply in learning. Instead, the act of cognition (how) and its object (what) were integrated parts in a process of Bildung.

By focusing learning as a change in how the contents was conceived of, the phenomenographic approach, and later variation theory, offered a rather straightforward and fruitful new opening in the 1980s for doing empirical research in subject didactics (German: Fachdidaktik). The most important principle of teaching following from this approach was to carefully find out the different ways the students understood the world, and then to turn the learner’s gaze and attention to similarities and differences between conceptions and to crucial aspects of the phenomenon (Marton, 2015; Marton & Booth, 1997; Marton & Tsui, 2004).

The idea of teaching in this the research program was as simple as strong: to begin by pointing at the empirical variation in how a group of people conceived of a phenomenon, and then to challenge the student’s original way of understanding. This pedagogical approach to teaching also reminds of Fichte’s (1796) own example of teaching as summoning: to provide the learners with material combined with presenting a problem to solve, by own activity. It also echoes Herbart’s theory of pedagogically working with apperceptions. In phenomenography, the teacher’s task was to pay careful attention to the students’ previous conceptions, ways of seeing or in-depth understanding of a phenomenon. In classroom learning, ‘the object of learning’ or ‘knowledge object’ was always the point of departure. Learning had occurred when the learner had changed her way of understanding from one conception to another and was able to identify other aspects of a phenomenon (Marton & Booth, 1997, p. 142).

From the phenomenographic approach, school didactics adopted this phenomenological perspective on student learning in terms of changes in how the content was experienced. Teaching was always teaching of something and learning was about actively being operant on one’s experience of this something, the knowledge object.

However, phenomenography applied a decontextualizing strategy in its research on conceptions. In this research program, the conceptions identified were not systematically related to the actual individuals, their history, the tradition, culture or the wider context. In contrast, school didactics wanted to remind of a hermeneutical approach to research on subject’s conceptions of learning objects (Uljens, 1992). Empirical research indicated that, for example, children’s understanding of how learning occurred not only varied with what they learned but also where this learning occurred (Mertaniemi & Uljens, 1994). Only through such a hermeneutic take, it was argued, phenomenology may open up for meaningful pedagogical studies of student’s conceptions. From a school didactic perspective, phenomenography was weak with regards to a theoretically explaining teaching, from both a pedagogical-interactional and societal-political vantage point. In addition, the approach limited its interest into studying learning the contents as such, but did not reflect very much on how this learning was educative in the sense argued by Bildung theory, that is, how teaching was able to develop general capabilities or how schooling prepared for a broader notion of citizenship.

In addition, school didactics emphasized more both curriculum work and evaluation, at different levels (Uljens, 1997a, p. 86). School didactics also redefined the object of didactics from research on teaching and learning, to the science of teaching-studying-learning process (Uljens, 1997a, p. 34f). To include ‘studying’, obviously made more sense, also from a phenomenographic point of view: teaching had to, if not start from, at least take seriously the teacher’s learning about the student’s way of seeing the world. Teaching and studying were considered notions describing human activities, whereas learning was a concept denoting a process, or something that may happen with humans when engaged in studying, problem-solving or just acting in the world. To see learning as a process or to see it as an activity reflect different ways to define Bildung (Lenzen, 1997), something we return to later on.

Non-affirmative Education Theory

In order to explore in more detail how Dietrich Benner’s understanding of general pedagogy is applied in school didactics, some features of non-affirmative theory need to be pointed out. Sharing Benner’s point of departure, this chapter argues we need to answer two broad questions when aiming at understanding teaching, studying and learning in schools, framed by educational leadership and curriculum work (Uljens, 1997a; Uljens, 2015; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017). The first question is how we explain pedagogical interaction. The second question is how we define the relation between public education and other societal practices. In Dietrich Benner’s approach to non-affirmative theory, two constitutive principles help to clarify the first question (pedagogical interaction), while two regulative principles clarify the second question (education and society, see Fig. 5.2). In this section, I first describe these principles shortly and then discuss how these four principles apply with respect to the school didactic position. In doing so, I point at the strength of this approach compared with some other theories.

Fig. 5.2
A correlation 2 by 2 table. Constitutive and regulative principles with the theory of education lead to summoning self-activity and pedagogical transformation, respectively. The theory of Bil dung leads to spontaneous corporeity and non-hierarchical order of practices, respectively.

Two constitutive and two regulative principles organising four basic concepts as related to theory of education and theory of Bildung (Erziehungs- und Bildungstheorien). (based on Dietrich Benner, Chap. 2, this volume)

Full size image

We will now read Fig. 5.2 ‘backwards’, starting from the corner below to the right (Principle 4). This regulative principle (4) concerns how we theoretically define the relation between education and other societal forms of practice including politics, culture and economics. This regulative principle argues that modern societies, in contrast to pre-modern ones, feature a non-hierarchical relation between different forms of societal practice. It means that they all influence each other, while also being influenced by each other. Interchanging, they are super- and subordinate to each other. For example, while politics decides about new laws, these laws regulate political practice itself. Education obviously operates under the influence of many societal practices, while simultaneously preparing the individual for participation in all of them. Obviously, any political system heavily influences how it organizes its education, yet all political systems are very dependent on how education prepares new generations for the system in question. As Benner reminds, this principle of societal practices, standing in a non-hierarchical relation to each other, is strictly taken not a pedagogical principle but rather describes how a modern, liberal, society operates, in principle.

The second regulative principle (Principle 3) asks how curriculum, administration, and other forms of governance and leadership contribute to transforming societal interests to pedagogical work. Parts of Didaktik, curriculum, leadership and policy research explicitly focus this principle, by studying how politics and other societal practices do influence education, and how professionals at lower levels enact policies. In political democracies, a central question in curriculum construction and implementation is how education should prepare for autonomous participation in future political, economic and cultural life. This principle reminds us that the transformation of societal interests should guarantee educational degrees of freedom for individual schools and teachers in order not to violate such pedagogical activity that recognize their own role in the learning process. The more teachers are expected to affirm given policies, the less space there is for critical and student-centred pedagogical treatment of aims and contents.

The third position (Principle 3) explains what pedagogical activity is about – educative teaching as summoning of self-activity – but it does so in relation to notion of Bildsamkeit (Principle 1). The principle of non-affirmative summoning to self-activity, indicate that pedagogical activity is about recognizing the Other, her reality, potentiality and interests, yet summoning the learner as a self-active subject, by inviting the learner to engage in activities that for the learner creates a reflective distance to her previous experiences. Affirmative teaching either aim at conservative transmission or reproduction of existing orders, or at transformative change, led by some predefined educational ideal. In contrast, non-affirmative teaching views education as operating in an emancipatory fashion, embracing the idea of negative freedom, that is, teaching as promoting learner’s freedom from something, which means to open up the world of knowledge for the learner, yet without intention to get the learner to unreflectively adopt some other predefined ways of relating to the world. It is well-known that mere participation in social practice does not necessarily contain the keys to conceptually grasp the principles operating in this practice. In contrast, conceptual teaching when related to practice contain such keys. Conceptual teaching that makes use of principled knowledge to explain or understand existing practice or empirical observations, is educative to the extent it contributes to the learner’s ability to reflect on how given theory relate to practice. For this reason, school teaching operate by dealing with selected, exemplary or representative contents that has wider validity. The aim is to help the learner to understand that the selected contents is just an example of something more general. Non-affirmative teaching then means to accept that teaching can only result in learning when teaching is mediated by the learner’s own discerning activity. Instead of equalizing the contents of teaching with the only aim of learning, non-affirmative education views the content also as the medium and method of teaching.

The ‘modern’ principle of teaching as summoning refers indirectly to political and moral liberalism of the eighteenth century, as advocated, among others, already by John Locke. Locke’s liberalism accepted the individual as not determined by birth or social class. Such liberalism is closely related with a non-teleological view of history and societal development, where the future was open and unknown. Locke thus disagreed with the Augustine Christian doctrine of the original sin. The dilemma that liberalism raised for education pointed at two different directions. On the one hand, given the new view of the subject’s radical freedom, education appeared to have all the power mould the subject according to own interests. On the other hand, this view of the individual as free or indetermined also raised the question if pedagogical influencing was possible in the first place? According to this interpretation, the student seemed to have the last word in deciding how external influences were to be received. The question was, how could the tension be settled between these two options? Was a choice between these two the only alternative, or was there a third option?

The principles of summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit as promoted by Fichte and Herbart offered the means to find a path beyond viewing education either as omnipotent, or education as totally powerless. These principles make up an argument that views education as something necessary, without disregarding the learner’s constitutive role. Differently expressed, these principles make education not only possible, but also demonstrate its necessity. On the one hand, although subjected to a world that the human being was unable to escape, education was made possible by human anthropological freedom. On the other hand, education was necessary for the individual’s becoming a culturally autonomous and self-determined subject, sharing culture with others, identifying herself in relation to it, but with capacity to move beyond it. Although education for these reasons was necessary, it could still not determine the subject, due to the subject’s anthropologically given freedom. In this way, the subject was dependent of education to reach cultural self-determination, but the possibilities to influence the subject was dependent on the capacity to learn and the subject’s own activity – Bildsamkeit. Herbart’s central contribution was to introduce the idea of pedagogical causality to overcome the antinomy between freedom and coercion, between the causality of nature and the causality of freedom. The concepts Bildsamkeit and summons to self-activity thus received a bridging function for Herbart (Siljander, 2008, pp. 74–76).

The final principle (1) is named with the German word ‘Bildsamkeit’ (Swedish ‘bildbarhet’, Finnish ‘sivistettävyys’). If Principle 4 (non-hierarchical relation between societal practices) describes an assumption regarding how societal practices are related, namely, in a non-hierarchical way, Principle 1, Bildsamkeit, instead describes the individual’s relational and dynamic interdependence between the subject and object. This interdependence is one of the core issues in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Here it must suffice to say that this view of Bildsamkeit reminds of Gurwitsch’s (1982) phenomenology of awareness as a noetico-noematic correlation emphasizing the relation between ‘the object which is intended’ and ‘the objected as intended’ (Uljens, 1992, pp. 66–69), which is a position close to phenomenographic non-dualist ontology, focusing the ‘object as experienced’.

Some might want to compare Bildsamkeit with human ability or capacity to learn, but although Bildsamkeit reflects human plasticity and ability to adapt to new circumstances, Bildsamkeit does not refer, in a limited sense, to an internal or immanent human capacity as thought of in most learning psychology. Rather, Bildsamkeit is a relational concept denoting subject-world relations, experiential in nature.

It is, hopefully, now clearer how the principles 2 and 3, in Fig. 5.2, describe pedagogical orientations, initiatives and interventions. Principle 2 refers to the pedagogue or teacher who acts in interpersonal relations aiming at supporting someone’s activity to reach insight or develop her ability. Principle 3 asks about the intentions and practices at a collective level that transform or contribute to transform, societal interests into pedagogical activity, thereby framing concrete teaching. The issue raised by this principle is to what extent these external influences force teachers to affirm them. The normative aspect of Principle 3 says that external interest should not be transformed in ways that endanger teachers possibilities to pedagogically question external interests and validity of existing knowledge, as only such pedagogical freedom for teachers allow students to themselves work with the teaching contents in creative ways and independently reflect on the meaningfulness of how given knowledge answers the questions it intends. These principles, 2 and 3, expressing pedagogical intentional interventions on a collective and an individual level, constitute what Benner calls ‘theory of teaching and education’ (Theorie der Erziehung).

Likewise, in this tradition of general pedagogy, theory of Bildung refers to two different but open and dynamic processes that form necessary prerequisites for understanding pedagogical intervention in modern societies. First, on an individual level (1), Bildsamkeit describes the individual learner’s self-active and dynamic subject-world relation. Second, on a collective level (4), theory of Bildung refers to the open dynamics and non-hierarchical relations between different societal and cultural practices.

A Non-affirmative Interpretation of School Didactics

In this section, I will discuss how the principles of non-affirmative education theory apply in school didactics.

In the history of educational theory, we can identify various models of how to relate education to societal interests and development. Variations of at least the following two positions are typical. First, a pre-modern way of thinking understands education as being located within the existing society or culture. This socialization-oriented model of education emphasizes that the task of education is to prepare the individual for the already existing society and culture. In this model, societal practices and norms function as the guiding principles. Education is then subordinate to societal practices. In this view, education itself is not used to transform or develop society, instead the school follows the development of an existing society, and is primarily oriented to prepare individuals for it. Today, versions of sociocultural apprenticeship-oriented learning research broadly follows this line of thought.

Second, in contrast to the conservative reproduction-oriented model, we are familiar with the idea of education as a revolutionary or transforming force with respect to human development or societal practices. In its radical forms, transformation-oriented education not only defends education’s emancipatory task, but also positions itself as superordinate with respect to societal interests. Instead, education should develop something that does not yet exist, that is, to work towards ideals, which, in the future, may become real as a new generation enters society after having received education. In this model, education is superordinate with respect to societal interests.

Both the reproduction and the transformation model are heavily normative. They are not primarily concerned with developing the individuals’ ability to autonomous reflection (Mündigkeit), which includes ability to make informed decisions regarding what is valuable. Strictly taken, these models run the risk of turning education, curriculum work, and teaching into indoctrination utilizing technological or instrumental activities where results relate to values external to the profession and practice. Some would even consider these models running the risk of violating the concept of democracy, as they subordinate education to political ideologies too directly. Compared with these positions, school didactics accept the critique of socialization and transformation-oriented ideologies, defending the non-affirmative position. Visually, school didactics communicated this by reminding that teachers’ planning of their teaching (P2) do not necessarily totally fall within curriculum policy at the national level (P1). It was reminded that teachers need to have this freedom to avoid an affirmative and instrumental view of teaching.

The non-affirmative position has occurred in various shapes throughout history. Rousseau, for his part, argued for a position between socialization and transformation-oriented pedagogy with his concept of ‘negative education’. Rousseau, in his famous foreword in 1762 argued that if some existing social condition is not acceptable, there is not much idea to prepare the growing generation into such a society. Education would then only reproduce unfavourable constellations. Consequently, Rousseau advocates an idea of negative education promoting the idea of negative liberty. Negative education is not the absence of educational influence, rather negative education wants to avoid the previously described affirmative positions.

We may describe non-affirmative school didactics by a distinction between negative and positive liberty, central in political philosophy and in social philosophy (Berlin, 1969). Broadly speaking, while negative liberty refers to freedom from external restraints or limitations, positive liberty refers to the capacity or possibilities to self-determination and practicing one’s intentions in relation to other’s interests. Obviously, education is central for reaching capacity for self-determination in practice. Only because civil rights are formally recognized (negative liberty), this does not mean that an individual has reached a true capacity or resources to execute these rights productively. For this to occur, school didactics defends positive liberty as an educational aim – the citizen must be recognized as having the capacity and the right to have access to the cultural tools for acting in one’s own interests as related to others’ interests. Different students may need various degree of support to reach such cultural tools. This means that positive discrimination is accepted by school didactics. In this limited sense, a distributive perspective on justice is relevant for understanding education.

The implication of this reasoning for education is that we are able to identify two versions of affirmative education. Reproduction-oriented affirmative education does not accept negative liberty (freedom from external restraints). Instead, education is seen as non-reflective socialization into something existing. In contrast, education as transformative affirmation indeed accepts negative liberty by arguing for education as emancipation from primary socialization. However, education as transformative affirmation does not stop here, but moves on arguing in favour of positive emancipation. Positive emancipation defines what pre-defined future ends education should aim at. Differently expressed, affirmative education that is transformative, aims at replacing primary socialization with some other way of seeing the world, defined in advance. Such a view does not pay attention to the fact that an open society requires subjects able of shared reflection and capability to own decision-making regarding the future.

Non-affirmative school didactics accepts negative liberty, arguing that education needs to problematize students preconceived experiences in order to liberate from something. However, instead of replacing negative liberty with unreflected positive emancipation, i.e. to lead the learner to a replacing, but predetermined, view of the world, non-affirmative school didactics favours developing positive liberty among students, that is, to promote the learner’s empirical, real capacity to practice one’s freedom. In Snellman’s (1861) words, by being led to ‘the world of knowledge’, the student reaches a cultural capital allowing her to move beyond her primary socialization (see Deng, 2016 for a contemporary discussion). The idea in non-affirmative education is to support the learner to reflectively and critically embrace those cultural, civic and societal insights, practices, abilities and tools, necessary for self-determinate action. To reach beyond experiences emanating in and from primary socialization, by moving to the world of knowledge, is to learn about that there exists ideas of what is counted as truth, in an epistemological sense. Pedagogically seen, however, the educative dimension of learning about such epistemological truths is understanding the relativity of this truth. To understand the idea of ‘true knowledge’ is to understand that we apply conventions that momentarily reduce complexity. In discourses, there are always things taken for granted. These taken for granted things may, in turn, be made objects of scrutinization. The educative treatment of the ‘world of knowledge’ also includes understanding that truths are never totally devoid of values. Only by understanding what it means that ‘true’ descriptions of the world are value-laden, one can learn to discern between opinions and truth.

Both affirmative and non-affirmative education policies typically defend the idea of comprehensive education as mandatory. Some might think this appears contradictory on the part of non-affirmative education. Obviously, accepting education as compulsory indeed limits individual freedom – the individual is not allowed to choose not to learn. However, in non-affirmative education this limitation of individual freedom is legitimate given the aims of schooling, which in a first step is negative negative liberty, in order for reaching positive liberty or productive freedom. This is the answer to Kant’s question of how it is possible to promote freedom by coercion.

Non-affirmative school didactics share the assumption that education and politics, as two forms of societal practices, relate to each other in a non-hierarchical way. Such a view accepts that politics direct and regulate education, but reminds that we need to reserve enough degrees of freedom for schools, so that the educated subjects will become able not only to act in an existing society as it is, but also to step into it with an ability to contribute to reformulating the political agenda of society. According to non-affirmative theory, politics of education, therefore, should engage with a permanent open question: ‘To what extent and how strong should politics steer or regulate education practice?’ If politics in advance strictly tries to decide how a future generation should think and act, then, paradoxically, this would endanger the future of a democratic state. That is, democratic states need to educate its citizens for democracy. To educate for democracy means on the one hand to practice various forms of democratic life in schools, but also to critically reflect and problematize how any form of democracy operates. Political education does not mean to prepare the growing generation following some specific political ideology, but to learn about various political ideologies, to investigate their claims, study how they operate, and to question them all in order to find a position that can guide one’s own action oriented citizenship. School didactics is normative by defending political democracy while not promoting any given ideology.

Following this non-affirmative position, school didactics argues that education and politics do not have to be super- or subordinated to each other. Consequently, non-affirmative school didactics identifies curricular ideals in a democracy as resulting from a public dialogue involving politics, cultural reflection and professionals’ opinions. While political decision-making point out certain cultural contents to be dealt with in schools, the relative autonomy of educational practice recognizes this, but deals with these contents in a problematizing way, thereby opening up a space for the student’s own treatment allowing not only learning the contents as such but learning to see it in perspective. Non-affirmative school didactics reminds us that the teachers in compulsory school systems must recognize existing interests, policies, ideologies, utopias, and cultural practices as knowledge objects, but this position would not ask practitioners to affirm them. Not to affirm various predefined interests means to not pass them on to the next generation, without making these interests into objects of critical reflection in pedagogical practice with students. According to non-affirmative school didactics, citizenship education for democracy cannot therefore be about straightforward socialization of youth into any given form of democracy, but must include experimental practice and critical reflection of historical, existing, and possible future versions of democracy. Non-affirmative school didactics defends the need for organizing social life in schools along given ethical principles, but connected with moral and political reasoning. Also in this perspective, non-affirmative school didactics supports reflective educational practice. This is what contributes to making school’s social and pedagogical practice educative.

Compared with affirmative positions, school didactics assumes, with non-affirmative theory, first, that the future is open (non-teleological cosmology), second, that the question of morality cannot be finally decided upon in advance and, third, that education is not totally subordinate to politics, but is allowed to problematise existing interests with pedagogical motives.

To fulfil their task in a political democracy, school didactics view schools as radical locations for experimental practice and reflection. To say that schools are radical locations for reflection, does not mean that they are locations for radical reflection in terms of education for ideologically loaded activism. In democracies, political activism and revolution are important contents in citizenship education. This contents can be made an object for critical treatment, as any other content.

Non-affirmative didactics then also means to help learners understand the questions to which existing practices, norms or knowledge are answers. Through this the learner is thought to acquire a personal relation not only to given answers (positive knowledge), but also to critically reflect the questions behind the answers. Of equal importance is to develop the ability to formulate new questions to answer.

As this pedagogy avoids unreflective affirmation (or confirming) of existing or possible ideal future states of affairs, it is a pedagogy where the teacher hesitates, stops up, and to tries to focus the questions behind answers given (questions behind positive knowledge). Consequently, we see the school partly as an institution within society, and partly as an institution allowed to stand outside society, the state, and the family. In this respect, public schools in democracies are, as observed, radical locations for reflection, but not locations for political radicalisation, if radicalisation refers to affirmation of some predefined political ideology.

How Societal Interests Transform into Pedagogical Practice: A School Didactic Perspective

The second regulative principle in Benner’s non-affirmative approach refers to how societal interests transform into pedagogical practice. Both the tradition of Didaktik, curriculum theory as well as policy research consider this transformation as a central topic. In practice, this occurs by a number of different mechanisms.

Curriculum research on these transformation processes cover several topics: (a) analysing the contents of curriculum (focusing the aims, contents, methods, etc.), (b) studying how schools and teachers enact existing curricula, and (c) studying curriculum reform activities, including policy work and educational leadership (Uljens & Rajakaltio, 2017). All three dimensions exemplify this second regulative principle. Sometimes, all these aspects are present in the same process. For example, curriculum reform activity features how curriculum is (i) initiated, (ii) enacted, and (iii) reflected, at different levels (Hopmann, 1999).

Empirically, it makes sense to try to identify different stages or phases of this reform process. In curriculum reform activity, initiating curriculum reform work is naturally different from implementing and enacting it. Yet, both initiation, implementation and enactment of the curriculum include elements of political, administrative, legal and pedagogical dimensions. It also makes sense to describe the discourses within and between different levels and parties (Wahlstrom & Sundberg, 2018) in a historical and comparative perspective.

A non-affirmative interpretation of school didactics recognizes this second regulative principle as dealing with the above issues. Curriculum and evaluation are two central regulative factors for understanding public education. Both activities are in most countries distributed across different levels. Sometimes curriculum and evaluation policies are not coordinated. At other occasions, they contradict each other. For example, in Finland, the most recent curriculum reform emphasized transversal competencies, thereby describing how generic competencies may appear related to specific teaching contents. Yet, most evaluation of learning is limited to evaluating subject matter knowledge. At times, tensions occur between the national and transnational level, a phenomenon familiar in the PISA process.

The critical point raised by non-affirmative theory is that transformation of societal interests in pedagogical practice should not jeopardize the schools’ and teachers’ possibilities to create a pedagogical space allowing the student’s own treatment and reflection. In addition, as educative teaching aims at something beyond learning the actual content, for example, to develop the students general ability to deal with the field of knowledge in question, or other content- or context-transcending qualities, teaching must operate beyond mere transmission or transformation. In fact, it is only though the learners’ own activity that Bildung as a kind of meta-learning is possible to reach. In a generational perspective, in such a process, learners come to realize we have access to knowledge that previous generations did not, and, at the same time, that our contemporary knowledge may appear as outdated in the future. Thus, the learner has come to see the question behind the answers.

Beyond Universal and Particularist Approaches to Transformation of Societal Interests

From the above we understand that the non-affirmative school didactics considers the transformation of societal interests as something operating across and within different levels. In Fig. 5.3, I talk about this in terms of various forms of educational leadership.

Fig. 5.3
An illustration. It includes first-order educational leadership with classroom or teachers, second-order with schools, principals, or head teachers, third-order at the municipal or district level, fourth-order at national, state, and substate, and fifth-order at transnational or international levels.

A multilevel approach to understanding various forms of educational leadership, for example, policy work, educational leadership by municipal leaders and principals, teaching. (e.g. Uljens & Nyman, 2013; Uljens & Elo, 2019; Elo & Uljens, 2022)

Full size image

A dilemma with defending a multilevel perspective is how to connect these various levels conceptually in research. In order to relate non-affirmative school didactics to contemporary research approaches focusing on this transformation process, we begin by identifying two major research strategies for connecting these levels. For the sake of convenience, I call them the universal and the particularist approach.

Today, there are a number of positions representing a universal approach to studying transformation of societal interests into pedagogical practice. These include actor-network theory (ANT) (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005), discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008), and refraction (Goodson & Rudd, 2012), but also Niklas Lumann’s systems theory, Yrjö Engeström’s cultural-historical activity theory and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development belong here. The strength of these approaches is their intention to offer a systematic language for analysing the dynamics within and across levels. As shown in Fig. 5.4, some of these universalist approaches are functionalist-conservative reproduction, while others are critical-transformative.

Fig. 5.4
A 2 by 2 correlation table explains the universalist and particularist approaches for the various reproductionist, critical, and emancipatory transformation theories.

Universal and particularist approaches in explaining the multilevel character of how societal interests transform into pedagogical practice in the light of reproduction-oriented and critical transformation-oriented approaches

Full size image

The reason why they are called universal is that they offer the very same conceptual language for understanding multi-level transformation processes in any societal practice – education, healthcare, communication, traffic, taxation, legal system or city planning. From an educational perspective, this universal character is also their weakness. They typically lack an idea of education, and when they represent an idea of education, they are either reproductionist or normative.

The particularist approach to understanding transformation of societal interests into pedagogical practice requires a multidisciplinary approach. Such an approach argues that curriculum reform and implementation is best studied with the help of theories and disciplines that supplement each other – educational policy analysis, governance research, educational leadership studies, organizational theory and research on teaching and learning. By combining different theories, the whole system is studied, the argument runs. Yet, in practice, we seldom see such cross-disciplinary research initiatives, combining, for example, didaktik and leadership research. As a result, the particularist strategy may risk remaining blind for the true multilevel character of school teaching.

As an alternative to the universalist and the particularist strategies, non-affirmative school didactics defend the idea that research on how societal interests transform to pedagogical practice ultimately must be based on a theory of education in order to be educationally relevant. The task for a theory of education would be to provide us with a conceptual idea that allows us to treat these levels coherently. The meaningfulness of claiming that these different levels connect by a single pedagogical idea depends on if we can demonstrate that it is possible for all levels involved to adopt to such an idea or principle.

Non-affirmative education theory offers the following question as a criterion for identifying a unifying principle. To what extent do all levels involved, in their summoning activities, recognize that transformation of societal interests do not violate the principle of the student’s self-active engagement with the learning contents, in order to reach insights in fundamental dimensions of the knowledge, central for culture and society? When looking at how transformative education policy or a conservative transmission policy answers this question, we see that they do not guarantee the degrees of freedom required.

Consequently, we need to reserve certain degrees of freedom for each and every level working with the transformation of societal interests into pedagogical practice. The different levels are to varying degree recognized as having the right to contribute to how this transformation is put into practice. However, transformation of societal interests into pedagogical practice is not only a question of administration, governance or finances. It occurs through a multitude of various processes. In this connection, we highlight only one limited aspect, as an example. This is the question of the pedagogical dimension of educational leadership (see also Elo & Uljens, 2022).

Non-affirmative school didactics argues that non-affirmative general pedagogy is better equipped to understand pedagogical work in schools including the system, than the above universal approaches as they lack an idea of education. Non-affirmative general pedagogy is also better equipped than the particularist approaches as they aim to combine very different theories. In line with this, non-affirmative school didactics argues that education theory offers us a language for understanding the what or the object of leadership – teaching-studying-learning process. Education theory also offers as a language for the pedagogical dimensions of educational leadership. By pedagogical dimensions of educational leadership I refer to those activities at different levels where education leaders, for example, promote professional development among professionals horizontally working within a given organisation or vertically across different levels of the education system. For example, the initiation, development and implementation of new curricula, include pedagogical activity at different levels. In this view, transformation of societal interests to pedagogical practice is to a significant extent mediated by pedagogical qualities of educational leadership. While non-affirmative school didactics argues for the necessity of a multilevel approach, it maintains a distinction between educational leadership and pedagogical leadership. Educational leadership refers to a multilevel and networked phenomenon concerning the governance (management, leadership, and development) of institutionalised education. Educational leadership involves leadership of educational institutions at a teacher-, school-, district-, national-, or supranational level. Educational leadership operate on all of these levels and include all aspects of what it means to manage, lead, and develop an educational institution (e.g. legally, organisationally, economically, relationally, pedagogically, or technologically). In this light, pedagogical leadership is only one dimension of educational leadership.

For example, national authorities may address or summon teachers in whole countries to make sense self-actively of a new policy. Also, if leaders are provided the degrees of freedom mentioned above, leaders at different levels may live up to the principle of non-affirmative summoning co-workers to engage in professional learning and development processes. The regulative principle of ‘transformation of societal interests’ may thus be applied as an analytical lens in comparative research: To what extent is the non-affirmative character of summoning and Bildsamkeit embraced as elements of pedagogical leadership?

In other words, non-affirmative school didactics support the idea of extending of summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit, from only covering educative teaching to include the pedagogical dimensions of educational leadership. Pedagogical activities lead curriculum implementation and enactment processes. For example, national authorities typically invite teachers and principals to reflect on the meaning of a new curricular initiative. Implementation and enactment of curricula is therefore also a pedagogical intervention. Here pedagogical intervention does not mean brute implementation of ready-made ideas but invitation to dialogue. In doing so, pedagogical leadership as curriculum work (Uljens, 2015; Elo & Uljens, 2022) recognizes the relative autonomy of the professional actors. The effects of a curriculum reform activity are then, obviously, also in the hands of the receivers enacting these intentions (Bildsamkeit). The curriculum-making discourse as invitation to self-activity and self-formation creates spaces within and between institutional levels.

Finally, leadership and management is more often than before related to the development of organisations’ operative culture. To lead such change processes involves more than supervising individual co-workers. Nonetheless, developing the operational culture is also a pedagogical task, as it aims at influencing this operational culture via professionals learning oriented activity. In school didactics, developmental leadership is primarily a pedagogical task and thus an object for educational theory to explain.

We think the above argumentation provides good reasons to approach educational leadership, and especially the pedagogical dimensions of it, utilizing non-affirmative pedagogy (Uljens, 2015; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017; Elo & Uljens, 2022). We believe that such an approach proves valuable when trying to overcome some of the difficulties following from universalist approaches to governance, insensitive for specificities of education institutions, and difficulties with particularist approaches that indeed do combine separate conceptual languages, yet not very well connected, thus resulting in disparate views.

Non-affirmative school didactics and education theory in general is considered fit for these purposes. Despite obvious differences, the very same theoretical constructs apply for analysing (a) the teaching-studying-learning process related to the aims and teaching contents of the curriculum and (b) the pedagogical dimensions of educational leadership in curriculum reform activity at different levels.

The third position beyond particularist and universalist positions represented by non-affirmative school didactics thus consist in an idea of pedagogical leadership of a certain kind that occurs on any level of the education system. This idea of pedagogical leadership thus consists of interpretative mediation involving the recognition of external influences but without affirming them. Non-affirmative summoning provides a tool to analyse in what ways and to what extent pedagogic actors, leaders, or institutions affirm either horizontal or vertical interests when they collaboratively mediate in a multilevel and networked system. This position provides a tool for analysing to what extent pedagogical summons are affirmative in character, that is, to what extent they require affirmative response.

Using Non-affirmative School Didactics for Identifying Policy Positions

As previously described, school didactics feature a multilevel approach regarding both (a) curriculum work and (b) evaluation. When we structure the multilevel character of curriculum work and evaluation, as in Fig. 5.5, we are able to use non-affirmative school didactics to identify four ideally different education policy positions.

Fig. 5.5
A cartesian coordinate system presents A and B. The first, second, third, and fourth quadrants include the 1910s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990 to 2000s. The y-axis A is labeled curriculum centralized and decentralized. The x-axis B is labeled assessment external and internal.

Five decades (1970–2020) of curriculum reform and assessment practices, related to broader political developments. (Following Uljens & Nyman, 2013)

Full size image

Figure 5.5 identifies, first, four different policy positions with respect to (a) curriculum making as something centrally or locally governed, and (b) by viewing assessment as something internally controlled by the school or something externally regulated. By the help of these two dimensions, we may describe developments in many countries regarding their educational policies during the past five decades (1970–2020). Second, on a more general level, Fig. 5.5 allows us to describe the transition from a social-democratic welfare state approach to curriculum and assessment in Europe (old public administration, OPA), to a neoliberal competition-oriented policy in the social liberal market state (new public management, NPM). Compared with Benner’s regulative principles, the policy positions in Fig. 5.5 show how societies transform existing interests into pedagogical practice in four different ways. On good grounds, we may expect that countries that accepting local curricula and defending teachers as the main responsible for evaluation of student performances, are more likely to apply the principles of non-affirmative education. For example, countries applying accountability-oriented assessment policy where students performances are seen as indicators of teaching quality, assume a false causal relation between teaching and learning, overlooking the students mediating role between teaching and learning.

The turn toward affirmative education policy challenged an established European post-war Bildung-centred and citizenship-oriented view of human learning and growth, which emphasizes reflective identity, personality, character, self-determination, autonomy and political and economic citizenship (Klafki, 1995; Hopmann, 2015; von Oettingen, 2016). One of the cornerstones of modern Bildung is the notion of autonomy (Mündigkeit) as the highest objective of education, that is, ability to discerning thought, moral awareness and reflected action regarding issues of both knowledge and values. Thus, autonomy in the Bildung tradition is not a performative competence but refers rather to a life orientation reflecting an idea of being as a process of continuous becoming. It is about an ability to form a personal idea of the world, see one’s role in it given shared knowledge, others’ interests, and act accordingly.

In addition to neoliberally influenced ideas of human competence, developments in education policy and curricula, we have also witnessed a culturally conservative or neoconservative movement in curriculum-making. It is a kind of back to basics orientation, emphasizing content learning and identity. One example of such a position, critical to neoliberal competency policy, is the one represented by the British sociologist Michael Young (2008). According to his idea of ‘powerful knowledge’, the task of public education is to provide all students with strong insights in substance knowledge. Such ‘powerful knowledge’ would then not be restricted to training performative qualifications and competencies like rule following or technical efficiency, but support students attainment of real insights and knowledge not accessible in everyday life. Powerful knowledge allow the learner to maintain authority by knowing based on understanding. However, as Deng (2021) demonstrates, the notion of powerful knowledge is founded in epistemology rather than theory of education, and Didaktik, thereby missing out the idea of educative teaching (Bildung).

For non-affirmative school didactics both directions, that is, the competency- as well as the content-oriented policy, appear one-sided. They simply repeat the old debate between formal and material theories of Didaktik, and variations thereof (Willbergh, 2016). This old debate deals with why, how and when generic knowledge should be prioritized over disciplinary subject-specific knowledge, or the other way around (Deng, 2016). Recent OECD policy revitalized this perennial issue.

In this context, we remind that most countries have naturally not forgotten the long-standing educational ideals of critical thinking, ethical responsibility, recognition and respect of the Other, or personal and civic autonomy. Yet, the weight of these ideals have diminished while performative abilities and instrumental competencies related to working life, or, alternatively, more content-centred approaches, have strengthened. Similarly, the previous era in Europe (1945–1989) naturally also prepared for participation in working life, but in comparison emphasizing less economic citizenship as an educational ideal.

Besides promoting the development of the above general abilities regarding social, cultural-ethical, political, rational and economic autonomy and citizenship, there is need to recall that teaching typically also intends to promote additional sets of general capabilities that are content-related. This set of general capabilities relate to the subject matter or fields of knowledge taught at school. As teaching only is capable of addressing a limited selection of topics within each school subject, this content need to be representative in the sense that it opens up for principled insight into the domain in question. Thus, practicing specific arithmetic calculations aims at developing the student’s mathematical thinking generally. Besides being valuable insights as such, teaching about rivers, mountains and cities in geography, aims, at a more general level, to an ability to understand formations of the earth, and how human culture relate to nature. In addition to learning about specific historical events, teaching history aims at developing a sense for history as something that results from human activity, and that everybody acting today creates future history. Such a non-teleological cosmology also bears the seeds of a pedagogy of hope. As the future is not about turning pages in a ready-written book, education is about learning to become a co-author the book itself. Agency, self-determination and ethical awareness become central in such a perspective.

School didactics, first, identify both general aims of education as meaningful: (a) aims transcending the contents (development of critical thinking, curiosity, experimental thinking, ethical awareness, a coherent personality, political agency, etc.) and (b) content-related general aims (e.g. ability of linguistic, mathematical, historical thinking as well as finding out how these fields or practice and knowledge interests the individual). Second, educative teaching in school didactics supports the attainment of both types of general aims as mediated by working with the subject matter (the what of teaching) in relation to learner’s own experiences, and mediated by the way pedagogical activities are socially organized in schools (the how of teaching). Third, in practice these dimensions are intertwined and do not occur as separate from each other. What would something like capability of critical thinking or moral responsibility be, as distinct from any content and the learner’s life experiences life (context)? These capabilities appear always in relation to content and context.

Bildung and Bildsamkeit in School Didactics

Bildung is a difficult concept to translate into English. However, its use in German, or in the Scandinavian languages, is also loaded with very different meanings and has been a fuzzy concept for very long (Lenzen, 1997, pp. 122–133; Hopmann, 2007; Sjöström & Eilks, 2020). In theories of Bildung, various aspects are emphasized:

  • Bildung as a capacity concept. Here Bildung refers to the human ability or capacity to learn or reflect, that is, Bildung as a human trait, indirectly featuring the idea of the individual as indeterminate, and that it is possible to influence the individual.

  • Bildung as activity concept. Here Bildung is not a capacity nor a process concept, but refer to the individual’s self-directed activity in experiencing and structuring the world.

  • Bildung as a process concept. Here Bildung does not refer to an inherent capacity, but to an ongoing process – by participating in everyday activities humans learn.

  • Bildung as a state or condition concept. Here Bildung, refers to the results of an individual’s learning process, or the aims education strives at.

  • Bildung as an influence concept. Here Bildung refers to pedagogical activity aimed at influencing somebody else studying or learning. In a broader sense, this notion refers to institutions involved (‘Bildungswesen’, ‘Bildungsverwaltung’, ‘Bildungspolitik’).

Non-affirmative theory of education and Bildung offers us a possibility to clarify how all these different versions of Bildung relate to each other and how we can describe the concept of Bildsamkeit, so central in this theory.

The principle of Bildsamkeit refers, first, to the individual as not being determined by anything, nor determined to anything but to her freedom. In this respect, the first above version of Bildung exists as a premise: the human being endows the capacity to learn from experience. Yet, second, Bildung as Bildsamkeit does not refer to a learning process as such, as learning is not an activity, but something that happens with us. Teaching, however, is an activity, so is studying. We cannot decide to learn, but we can decide to try to learn, that is, to ‘study’. In this perspective, Bildsamkeit instead refer to that the learner is recognized as an originally active subject, with potentiality to learn. This potentiality becomes real by the subject’s own actions that operate relationally on the world as experienced.

In phenomenology, intentionality of the mind refers primarily to human awareness as being directed to the world as experienced. Intentionality refer to the unity between the act of directing awareness, and the object as experienced, which is what the individual is aware of (Uljens, 1992). Like in phenomenology, also in Bildsamkeit, this directedness is in no way capsulated to an inner solipsist world – rather, it is about being in the world, with the world. Bildsamkeit as the subject’s directedness to the world thus includes a self-active dimension operating with phenomena external to the subjects, but still operating with these phenomena as they are experienced. In this light, Bildung as Bildsamkeit is an activity concept.

In other words, the subject, already by herself orients herself to the world. It is this relational orientation towards the world that opens up a possibility to understand pedagogical interventions as a part of the subject’s experienced world, and towards which the subject may turn her attention. One might say Bildsamkeit offers a possibility for pedagogical interventions, or that Bildsamkeit makes such pedagogical influencing meaningful. School didactics embraces such a view.

Consequently, teaching in terms of pedagogical summoning is an intervention in the subject’s existing active world relation, through which the individual continuously repositions herself in relation to herself, to others and to the world. Thus, also in pedagogical situations learners’ own attention and activity mediate pedagogically designed influences, possibly resulting in learning. Consequently, in this perspective educative teaching is about summoning the subject to self-activity through which the subject may transcend her current experiences, by working with selected contents, ultimately understanding oneself as a subject capable of self-determined action.

“Bildsamkeit” denoting the previously described universal feature of what it is to be human – to stand in such a dynamic relation to others, the world and oneself – is thus a precondition for teaching. In the teaching-studying-learning process, I want to identify a specific class of activities on the learner’s side, namely those very activities that may come into being as initiated by the teacher’s summoning. The learner may accept the teachers’ summoning as an invitation to engage in studying. Both teaching and the student’s activity have a reasonably clear beginning and end. These specific activities on the side of the student or pupil appear as a type of Bildsamkeit beyond the mere capacity to learn, and beyond human everyday activities involving sense-making. Bildsamkeit, in the form of the student’s sense-making activity or reaching beyond existing knowledge or competence, when engaged in pedagogically initiated processes, I call ‘study activity’.

To sum up, the principle of Bildsamkeit, including the idea of human plasticity, makes teaching through summoning to self-activity possible. On the one hand, as Bildsamkeit is relational in reaching out towards and operating the world, educational influences form a part of the individual’s external world. Thus, this concept allows education to operate as an influence, yet not assuming that external influences determine the subject. On the other hand, it accepts humans as fundamentally self-active, yet not assuming the individual as capable by itself to acquire conceptual knowledge only by mere participation in social life. In this respect, education appears both as something possible, but also necessary. In its own way, the position is an answer on the Kantian question of how to promote development of individual freedom by external force. In the above perspective, education is something necessary for the individual in reaching cultural autonomy by embracing general or knowledge or principled insight. From a school didactic perspective, this implies that mandatory education is congruent with education promoting self-determination and autonomy in a political democracy.

Pedagogical Work as Summoning Self-Activity

As observed above, in school didactics, educative teaching in terms of summoning self-activity carves out a position between, or rather beyond, an idea of the individual as externally determined either by contents or other’s individuals (determinism) and internally driven (radical constructivism, transcendental idealism, trait psychology). In this light, summoning and Bildsamkeit in terms of an invited activity are relational – teaching as summoning requires Bildsamkeit as an anthropological condition, while Bildsamkeit as study activity always point at experiencing influences in terms of teaching contents presented as representing something in relation to the individuals previous understanding. In this respect, how the subject develops depend on, but is not determined by teaching. What comes out of an education process, we cannot know in advance. Summoning recognizes the subject with potential to come to understand herself as the free and indeterminate being she is. But, by acquiring cultural tools, individuals also reach a freedom, beyond the freedom or openness given by birth. In this respect, the individual reaches cultural or productive freedom only among other human beings.

Through educational actions from the teacher’s side, with the learning subject, a transitional space of Bildung is established. This pedagogical space is a temporary construction, a space that depends on the engagement of the subjects involved. This experiential or virtual space is a space in which the learner does not feel alone but experiences being recognized, experiences being accepted but also challenged, experiences being involved in working on a topic. This space offers the subject a learning opportunity to exceed herself.

Insofar as educational activity summons the learner’s self-activity, it entails (1) recognizing the subject’s potentiality and ability to engage in self-directed learning, but also, importantly, (2) being attentive to the concrete life situation of the other, their phenomenological or experiential reality and personal life history. Such cultural awareness and knowledge is important.

Recognition and the Tact of Teaching

How the learner appears to perceive herself and the world is crucial, and it points to the phenomenological sphere of interest. It is important for a learner to experience the teacher as somebody who cares for her and somebody who is present for her in the educational situation, that is, to meet and see the student as she appears as an existential subject to the teacher.

A further dimension of recognition relates to the educator’s actions supporting the individual’s right to develop a reflected own will. If the establishment of the individual’s self-image is dependent on social interaction with others, and if the ability to discerning and critical, autonomous thinking are recognized as individual rights, then pedagogical activity appears as a response to the moral demand that arises from recognizing these particular rights (Fichte, 2000).

The teacher’s recognition consists in truly seeing the Other as a unique subject, assuming both that the individual’s development is not determined by something totally pre-given and that the growing persons are entitled to develop a ‘voice’ of their own, through own activity. Pedagogical encouragement thus points to the need to observe how a child responds to the call for self-activity, without assuming (as in conventional affirmative pedagogy) that they should end up at a predetermined form of perception.

A non-affirmative call for self-activity in schools assumes that the study process is guided, by definition, also by the student’s own voice. The teacher’s use of communicative provocations as educational actions should deliberately refrain from unproblematic confirmation of both current social interests and ideal future states. Such a conscious pedagogical judgement creates spaces for meaningful study activity, acknowledging the student’s right to exercise conscious initiatives and actions within the educational dialogue.

The non-affirmative approach also has to deal with a pedagogical paradox, but now in a new version. Following Benner’s interpretation, this version of the paradox states that the individual has to be treated as if she/he were already capable of what she/he is being encouraged to do (Benner, 2015). An example of this is, when a child, close to learning to stand on her/his own feet, is asked to take a few steps across the floor to a waiting adult who will embrace her/him. Here caretaker treats the child as if it can walk already, even if it is only through responding to the parent’s call, that the child, by their own activity, actually may learn to take her first steps in life. Yet, it is an open question whether this happens or not: time will tell, but we do not know for sure in advance. When Herbart refers to the concept of pedagogical tact, his intention is to show that the call not only falls back upon recognition of the freedom of others, but that it must, in order to function, be experienced as reasonable by the other person in the dialogue. In such tactful action, the pedagogue shows awareness of the empirical reality, life situation, and identity of others.

Concluding Remark

This chapter started from the assumption that educational theories are historical and contextual in nature. Thus, while universally valid theories are assumed impossible, ambitions to develop general approaches are defended, expecting them being conceptually broad enough and capable of responding to global developments the past decades. The idea in this chapter was to discuss, from the perspective of school didactics, the feasibility of some core concepts developed within earlier and later modern of theory of Bildung and theory of education, especially as conceptualized by Dietrich Benner. School didactics was read by the help of these concepts, to more precisely determine the school as a radical institution for pedagogical work promoting Bildung.

As a result, given how school didactics was originally developed as a conceptual system, and given the sources it drew on both with respect to empirical phenomenology, previous German Didaktik, curriculum theory and the forgotten Hegelian roots of Finnish education theory, school didactics was possible to reinterpret along the principles as explored by Dietrich Benner. Also, a distinction between the concepts of recognition (Anerkennung) and summoning (Aufforderung) was considered motivated. Recognition would thus refer to a kind of affirmation of the learner as a human being capable of learning, and recognition of the learner’s rights, which correspond to the educator’s moral responsibilities, but also to recognition of the learner as a person. Summoning, in turn, challenges the learner’s experiences. Keeping these separate for analytical reasons is useful for identifying how pedagogical activity operate as a balancing act between various interests in compulsory education. Perhaps the distinction makes it easier to talk about pedagogical activity and Bildung as the creation of a experiential pedagogical space allowing the learner to create a necessary distance to one’s personal experiences by the help of teaching content, and simultaneously to evaluate what possible meaning and validity the contents may have given the life experiences of the learner. This dialectical activity between reflecting the contents against one’s experiences and one’s experiences against the contents may allow the learner think differently, or be critical of the content’s validity. In both cases, we see growth. Further, the chapter reminded of that Bildsamkeit may first be perceived as an anthropological precondition featuring human existence, and second, as that specific activity the learner responds by being invited or summoned in a pedagogical situation. The position developed in this chapter may therefore be labelled non-affirmative school didactics.