From Testing to Field Experiment. The Social Use of Didactic Objects in the Classroom

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Herbert Kalthoff; Professorin Dr. Jutta Wiesemann
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 258997310

School as an institution is embedded in a number of other institutions or organisations (e.g., public administrations, education industry). The project investigates how didactic objects produced by the education industry are used in selected schools and how experiences made with the objects flow back to the producers. Thus, we study these objects biographies, their relevance to knowledge acquisition in school and the recursiveness of production and application logic. Handling materials, objects and artefacts is a key component of learning processes and teaching practices in school. The research proposed in this project is based on empirical case studies on the cooperation between educational institutions and the education industry. Through this setup the project contributes to clarifying the theoretical question, discussed in materiality research, how to conceptualize the relationship between the prefiguration of action by objects and situated action with objects.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants