Project Details
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Practices of classroom attentionality

Subject Area General Education and History of Education
Term from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 395491305
 
Final Report Year 2025

Final Report Abstract

The project Praxen der Aufmerksamkeit im Unterricht (PAU) employed the phenomenological-videographic approach developed at Humboldt University to investigate the embodied and material dimensions of attentional practices in classroom settings. Students in 9th grade from four school classes across three different schools representing diverse social milieus in Berlin were videographed. The data corpus consisted of eight videographed lessons and 19 ethnographic descriptions, from which eight sequences were isolated. These sequences were cross-referenced with field notes and background information and documented in thick descriptions. Additionally, they were symbolically analyzed and categorized using the video analysis software Feldpartitur. Based on this, four exemplary cases were identified using theoretical sampling. The underlying thesis was confirmed: shared attention emerges from the correlation of attending and showing, which must be differentiated according to the school subject and the subject matter. This was examined first from the perspective of showing. Practices of showing were differentiated into showing something (representation), showing oneself (presentation), and according to their horizon (mundanity). Interattentionality, sociality, existentiality, and the mundanity of showing were demonstrated through typical sequences and presented in several publications. Second, the affectivity of especially showing oneself was elaborated in more detail. This was done using the example of the emotion of shame and thus achieved an emotional and educational-theoretical expansion of research on showing and attention. Third, the constitution of the subject matter was analyzed from methodological and didactic perspectives. The subject matter as the content of what is taught or learnt in class was revealed as a problem of constitution. In doing so, findings were generated for both general educational theory and general didactics. Fourth, based on the problem of subject matter constitution, the question of representation as a "showing of the world" or as a "world-centred education" was developed. In this context, practices of showing and attending were situated within an educational-theoretical framework of world relation. While reliable results and publications are available for the first two focal areas, the latter two have so far opened up research horizons in several publications and require further development toward an empirically informed theory of classroom teaching and a theory of education in relation to the world.

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