It is also by the help of the tension between the world as a whole and the individual as a whole (or the perfection of the individual) that Herbart responds to John Locke's and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's dilemma whether to cultivate children as the natural man or the modern citizen. Herbart argues that Rousseau's educational program is "too expensive," while Locke's program relies too much on "social vulgarity." The keywords of Rousseau's education are "nature" and "life," and the main task is to produce "nature-humans" (*Naturmenschen*) (cf. Herbart, 1897b, p. 81), who can break away from the degenerate world. However, Émile's education is a non-institutionalized or one-to-one education, in which the educator had to

accompany the child from his birth to adulthood. However, the teacher's companion is valuable considering the high mortality rate of children at that time. On the other hand, according to Rousseau's approach, the "natural man" had, frst of all, to be cultivated among the people who were deeply imbued with the society and culture of that time, after which he had to be able to return to a "society so heterogeneous," to continue his life. This whole process undoubtedly requires too much effort of the educator. The key term of Locke's educational thought is "the conventions of the society," that is, "the rales of courtesy and good society with all the varieties arising from difference of persons, times, and places, and who will then assiduously direct his pupil as suits his age to the observation of these things." (cf. Herbart, 1897b, p. 81). Education is a kind of "worldly education" (*Welt-Erziehung*), which produces "real men of the world" who will repeat the mission of the previous generation and live in the same way as the previous generation. For Herbart, Rousseau's vision of a "natural man" implies that mankind will repeat, as far as possible from the beginning, a series of evils that have already been overcome, while Locke's scheme of a "real man of the world" implies the continuation of the evils of the present society (cf. Herbart, 1887e, pp. 5–6; 1897b, pp. 78–81).

What Herbart considers is how to prevent the growing generation from being divorced from the reality of society, but also to prevent them from getting too deep in it. In other words, how can the children be led to "a better existence" (ein besseres Daseyn)? In answering this question, Herbart does not seek help from other educational thinkers, but tries to fnd the answer to this question in the overall process of human spiritual and intellectual development history. He observes and describes the "reality of the child as a fragment of a vast whole" in which the child is "in the full force of what one has felt, found and thought" (cf. Herbart, 1964c, p. 7), to describe and present in an aesthetic way the "picture" (*Bild*) of "what the nature man fundamentally could and should be" (cf. Herbart, 1887a, p. 12). In order to represent the world aesthetically, it is necessary for the educator to refect on his own times, and to turn children's attention to the beginning of the historical sequence and human culture. The aim was to return to the "pure origin of the light of history," that is, to those times that were written by masters, and whose spirit was constantly drawn upon by poets. The idea was to rethink the nature and the image of the human being, to rethink the value and the inner logic of education (*Erziehung* and *Bildung*) (Herbart, 1887d, p. 265). Based on the above ideas, the management of children and educative teaching both are the preparatory activities, while Zucht is the supporting force that ultimately enables the growing generation to move into the public sphere.

Thus, when we engage in rethinking, in the sense of Herbart's concept of the "aesthetic representation of the world," we come to understand the non-affrmative character of his didactics: the task of teaching is to allow the children to obtain Bildung during the process of the many-sided, active and free interaction with the world as a whole. On the one hand, politics, art, ethics and religion are refected in the contents of teaching and learning in a pedagogically meaningful way, that is, in a way that is appropriate for children's plasticity and his learning ability. On the other hand, the children always are involved in their "formative experiences" in the dialectical interaction between "plasticity" (*Bildsamkeit*) (cf. Herbart, 1902, p. 70) and "self-activity" (*Selbstthätigkeit*) (cf. Herbart, 1902, pp. 145–146). As they grow into adolescents and then enter society, they will then use their formative experiences to improve the conditions in the public sphere (cf. Herbart, 1887e, pp. 118–126).

#### **The Non-affrmative Requirements for Modern Teaching-Learning Relationship in Consideration of Educative Teaching**

Based on the concept of the "aesthetic representation of the world," we can see the non-affrmative requirements that Herbart establishes for the modern teachinglearning relationship. The process of teaching-learning consists of the teacher, the student and "the third thing," that is, the contents of teaching and learning. In the process of educative teaching, the teacher is the demonstrator and the supporter, who opens the process of Bildung and the acting process of the students with "pedagogical tact" (cf. Herbart, 1887c, p. 286). The contents of teaching and learning refect a world that consists of history and the present, the near actuality and the remote, the great whole and the fragment, the ideal and the reality (cf. Herbart, 1897b, p. 87).

For the teacher, educative teaching is the science of imparting the knowledge (cf. Herbart 1887e, p. 10; 1897b, p. 84). The imparting of multiple aspects of knowledge is only his basic task. The more central task is to develop children's living sympathy, refned taste, true penetration and spirit of observation (cf. Herbart, 1897b, p. 104), to develop their ability of thinking, judgment and action, and enable them to acquire the foundation for ethical action (*Tugend*), that is, the insight. This spiritual formation process is fundamentally the result of the student's own interaction with the world as a whole. However, this process could not be initiated without the teacher's support as the children's pre-existing knowledge is based only on daily experience, and their communication experience is based only on interaction with their family, peers and neighbours. In other words, they are all based on children's surroundings, on the near actuality and the fragment. The teaching process is thus charged with the responsibility of expanding the children's experience and communication or sympathy. The basic structure of this art of expansion is the "aesthetic representation" in terms of poets and historians, through growing knowledge of men (i.e., anthropology), through moral and religious discourses (cf. Herbart, 1887d, pp. 268–269; 1897a, p. 75), and to show children what does not exist in front of their eyes. The successful initiation of this process of expansion is dependent on the teacher's pedagogical tact, that is, the teacher's ability to make sharp judgments and decisions in an actual situation (cf. Herbart, 1887c, p. 286). Fundamentally, this is the process of expanding "Bildung horizons of modern man" (cf. Benner et al., 2015, p. 117).

The teacher is the presenter of the world as a whole, and the student is the active viewer of the contents presented by the teacher. Under the teacher's "aesthetical representation" and "show" operation (*zeigen*), the students' attention is awakened and the process of "concentration" (*Vertiefung*) and "refection" (*Besinnung*) is thus initiated. According to the German scholar Klaus Prange, the action of showing, pointing or guiding contains a double layer of meaning. First, there is the movement that guides the subject towards the "fact" (*Sachverhalt*) and thus forms a link from the subject to the object. Second, there is simultaneously a movement from the "fact" to guidance of the subject, which forms a link from the object to the subject (cf. Prange, 2012, p. 68). This two-way relationship is similarly encompassed in the processes by which students engage in aesthetic perception or aesthetic judgment (cf. Prange, 2010, p. 20). As soon as the student begins to see the world, presented to him by the teacher, with his own eyes and perspective, he begins the process of constructing a relationship with the others, with the outside world. He is therefore a thinker, a perceiver and an appreciator as well as a viewer. As this process begins, the students will gradually become a person in action. The insight that Herbart wants his students to acquire is precisely the "the refection of the power of judgment" (cf. Kant, 2000), which is demonstrated when the student's horizons of Bildung is expanded.

The contents of the world (*Weltinhalte*), that is, *what* the teacher represents, and *what* the students see, think and judge, connect the teacher's and the student's interaction in the teaching-learning process. In this, there is a connection between the reality of the world and the ideal state of the society, the present situation of the human spirit (i.e., the present state of the student) and the ideal (the re-presentation of the ideal spirit picture of modern humanity, as it had been in the ancient Greeks). This process should have aesthetic property. It encompasses all the technical and methodological aspects of teaching, and learning should always be open to the students and allow them to enter and be able to bring themselves to the interaction process with the world. This interaction should also have a formative force (*bildende Kraft*) and contain the direction and the goal of students' formation process of their spiritual and intellect. Once the student has begun to interact with the contents of the world, he or she may set himself or herself on a process of moving ever closer to the perfection (*Vollkommenheit*).

In educative teaching, as Klaus Prange has pointed out, the teacher, through certain "operations," shifts the students' attention to the contents that they have not yet mastered and that they cannot master only by themselves. These operations are the connecting bridges between the "known" and the "unknown." In this process, the children learn and act under the guide of the teacher's "operations" and gradually move towards that "middle ground," updating their previous experiences and acquiring new ones. In Herbart's context, this "operation" is, in general, what he calls an "aesthetic representation," and accordingly, children's learning is a constructive process based on their aesthetic perception and judgment. This aesthetic ability of students is neither a purely receptivity nor a purely spontaneity or self-activity, but a "creative (*produktiv*) receptivity" (cf. Prange, 2012, p. 95).

#### **Conclusion**

Now we come to the fnal question: What role could educative teaching play when we talk about the alienation of the teaching-learning relationship in prevailing big data-based measurement and assessment? The theory of educative teaching understands the teaching-learning relationship based on the interaction between three causalities – educative causality, formative causality (*bildende Kausalität*) and methodical causality (cf. Benner, 2020, p. 31). Such way of understanding the teaching-learning relationship can remind us how to grasp the nature and the essentiality of the teaching-learning activities and the teaching-learning relationship in the context of big data-based measurement and assessment. An important reminder of educative teaching is that the meaning of teaching occurs at the very moment when the teacher, in interaction with the students, opens up the interaction process between the students themselves and the contents of the world, that is, occurs in the spiritual formation process, through the processing of the contents of the world. The initiation and advancement of this relationship always presupposes the active participation and action of the student in the teaching process. In their interaction with the contents of the world and with the others, the students not only acquire basic knowledge, but also, and more importantly, develop their own "very mobile and active mind" (*vielgewandter und vielgeweckter Geist*) (cf. Herbart, 1887d, p. 266; 1897a, p. 67). They expand their own horizon of Bildung, construct their "formative experience" and virtuous experience, and develop their refective judgement and morality. In this sense, the aim and value of the teaching-learning process in the perspective of educative teaching is not only to advance the educational aim or purpose as a whole, which all forms of educational action (i.e., children management, educative teaching and Zucht) need to share, but also to open up and advance the spirit formation process of the students. Such a theory of teaching and learning, based on the non-hierarchical or intrinsic logic of education process (*Erziehung* and *Bildung*), provides us an important and necessary way of understanding the nature of teaching-learning activities and their relationships in the era of big data-based educational measure and assessment.

#### **References**

Schwenk, B. (1963). *Das Herbartverständnis der Herbartianer*. Julius Beltz.

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## **Chapter 5 Bildung-Centred Non-affrmative School Didactics**

**Michael Uljens**

**Abstract** This chapter contributes with a novel analysis of how non-affrmative theory of education and Bildung contribute to the development of *a second generation of school didactics* (Uljens, School didactics and learning. Psychology Press, Hove, 1997). Despite differences in terminology, non-affrmative general pedagogy and school didactics have similarities. First, inspired by the early reception Hegelinfuenced education theorizing in Finland (J. V. Snellman, Z. J. Cleve), school didactics (SD) focuse the relational teaching-studying-learning process, which resembles the constitutive principles of summoning and Bildsamkeit. Second, both are Bildung-centred regarding the centrality and the educative treatment of teaching contents from the learner's perspective. Third, despite one is centered on general pedagogy ('Allgemeine Pädagogik') and the other on didactics, both focus the *school* as an educative institution. Fourth, both focus how societal interests transform into and infuence pedagogical interaction. Fifth, both accept a non-teleological view of societal development. Sixth, both positions accept critical citizenship (Mündigkeit) and democracy as central for public education. Yet, the chapter shows how the principles put forth in non-affrmative general pedagogy signifcantly deepens many themes in the early version of school didactics. The present version of school didactics makes a contribution by identifying three related pairs of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and explains the transition between these by the principles of summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit. Non-affrmative SD also reminds that educational leadership is necessary for understanding school teaching.

**Keywords** Didaktik · School didactics · Non-affrmative education theory · Teaching-studying-learning process · Educational leadership

M. Uljens (\*)

Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies, Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### **Introduction**

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

The frst 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 frst discussion on the relations between school didactics and non-affrmative 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 feld 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 refected 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-affrmative 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-affrmative 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 *refexive theory of didactics*. Despite a different terminology, it is obviously reminiscent of the nonaffrmative approach, making a closer dialogue inspiring. The reason for choosing the, then odd, expression of *school didactics* in favour of g*eneral didactics* was, frst, that the 'learnifcation' of society was more than obvious already 30 years ago, in the 1990s. As *general* didactics obviously did not aim at clarifying teaching and

1Anglo-American readers understand the concept of 'didactics' better today than for 30 years ago, but it is still necessary to point out that German-Nordic 'didactics', 'didaktik' or 'Didaktik' has nothing to do with the traditional, pejorative meaning of the term 'didactics' in English (cf. Arnold, 2012).

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 nonaffrmative 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-affrmative 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 infuence, but nor are they totally subordinated to these infuences.

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 subfeld 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 diffcult 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, selfdetermination and co-determination are core questions in both school didactics and non-affrmative 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 specifc 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-affrmative 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-affrmative 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 fnd 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-affrmative education theory perspective, in a frst 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 infuenced 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 infuences 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 fnal step, the chapter demonstrates how school didactics apply and expand on the constitutive and regulative principles identifed by Dietrich Benner. In a later chapter in this volume, related to the present one, I refect, 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 intersubjectivity 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 Infuences**

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 frst 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 refection 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 frst 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, refective 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 felds of knowledge) or content-transcending (critical thinking, responsibility, ability to cooperate, self-confdence, 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 refective aquirement of essential features of the culture in order to develop into a coherent and self-refective, unique individual or person, able to act autonomously out of a refected will and discerning thought in relation to others' interests. By utilizing existing knowledge, such educative or non-affrmative teaching also aims at leading the student to the questions that the selected knowledge want to answer. Such teaching opens up for refecting 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-affrmative 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-affrmative 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 frst step in identifying the object of a theory of didactics, in one sentence, the school didactic approach identifed 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) refection of pedagogical initiatives, at different levels, thereby acknowledging (4) the multiple contexts constituting the

• The inner part (e.g. P1, P3, E3) describe teaching as intentional non-affirmative pedagogical summoning of students self-activity (Bildsamkeit), operating through individual and shared intentions, activities, experiences and reflection around selected contents (1.), in the tension between external interests (society, curriculum, evaluation, family, culture) and the student's life-world.

• The outer arrow (2.) indicate the non-hierarchical relations between education and other societal practices. The interests of external instances transform into practice primarily through curriculum work, organization of evaluation, leadership and management at different levels.

School = Classroom and local school as contexts

**Fig. 5.1** Levels and forms of pedagogical activity according to non-affrmative school didactics. (In Uljens, 1997a)

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.

#### *Why 'School Didactics'?*

A closer look at approaches identifed 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 frst 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 signifcantly.

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 fulfl 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 defne *didactics* (Didaktik), as a science or discipline of *teaching and learning.* To my mind, such a defnition 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 infuences human learning indirectly, mediated by pupils' and students' own activity to make sense of the world, others and themselves. Consequently, school didactics was defned as the science of *teaching, studying and learning* process (T-S-L), (Uljens, 1997a).2 The

2 I defended *School Didactics and Learning* as my doctoral dissertation in December 10, 1995, in Finland, with Prof. Ewald Terhart (education/didactics) and Prof. Pekka Niemi (psychology) as my opponents at the public defense. Psychology Press accepted to publish the dissertation without any revisions, and released the volume in the beginning of 1997.

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 fnd new ways of expressing artistic views or to refect one's values and moral reasoning.3

Such a view of 'studying' as a necessary activity mediating pedagogical infuence 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.4

In non-affrmative 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.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 identifes 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 infuence schools' work. Expressing the position in the terminology of non-affrmative 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 frst true holder of the professor's chair in Finland, Z. J. Cleve (1884), strongly recommended

3At the time, I was not aware of Fichte's view of teaching as summoning to self-activity.

4Professor Dietrich Benner visited Åbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, for the frst time in May 1996, as keynote speaker at a symposium on European education. Among the other participants were Prof. Dieter Lenzen, then professor at Freie Universität, and Prof. em. Wolfgang Klafki from Marburg. In 2011, Benner became Honorary Doctor at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. 5The professor of education in Finland, J. J. F. Perander (1883), recognized Rousseau's and Herbart's contribution in turning education away from 'dogmatic education' and its aim to pass on the cultural heritage to the growing generation. Instead, the aim was, in Perander's interpretation, to develop the learner's general, and thereby human capabilities. To educate towards a 'plurality of interest' (Herbart) made the subject prepared for a multitude of future possibilities. Selfdevelopment and development of the learner's capacities, especially will and character, should guide the selection and treatment of the contents.

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 refect 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 diffcult 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).6 Here *educational leadership* covers a wide sphere of knowledge felds 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

6The opposite is also true. Educational leadership models very often are educationally mute (Uljens, 2015). Educational leadership research seldom provide a language for *what* is led, i.e. pedagogical activity. In cases when teaching and instruction is present, leadership models often lack an idea of the societal role of the school. Again, when such an idea exists, it is often prescriptive, explaining how school leaders most effciently could affrm existing policies, or contribute to the transformation of society, according to ideals presented. In addition, educational leadership research seldom explore the *pedagogical* dimensions of leadership practice itself, including both supporting professional growth of individual teachers and developing the operational culture of the entire school.

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-affrmative 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 infuences 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 codifcation 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-affrmative 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-affrmative education theory. Thus, contemporary non-affrmative 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 frst 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 frst 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 refective and questioning way. Thus, Bildung aims at a refective 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 frst 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 signifcant 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.7 This early textbook exemplifes 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 subfeld 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, modifed 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 refected 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

7Cleve also contributed to establishing the National Board of Education, and initiated a journal for education (Tidskrift Utgifven av Pedagogiska föreningen i Finland, Cleve, 1865). For an excellent overview of the development of philosophy in Finland, describing Hegelianism, between 1809 and 1917, see Manninen et al. (2021).

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, infuences from Herbartianism continued within teacher education until WWII through Mikael Soininen's textbooks. Phenomenological and philosophical research by Juho Hollo during the frst 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 frst 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 exemplifed a kind of educational empiricism, with clear infuences 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 infuential 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 frst 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 infuence 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.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 infuential 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 scientifc 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.

8Wolfgang Klafki visited Finland twice. Both visits were to Åbo Akademi in Vaasa. The frst time in 1994 and the second, and last time, in 1997 (Klafki, 1995; Uljens, 1997a).

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 fnd 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 identifed 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 pedagogicalinteractional and societal-political vantage point. In addition, the approach limited its interest into studying learning the contents as such, but did not refect 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 redefned 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, problemsolving or just acting in the world. To see learning as a process or to see it as an activity refect different ways to defne Bildung (Lenzen, 1997), something we return to later on.

#### **Non-affrmative 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-affrmative 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 frst question is how we explain *pedagogical interaction*. The second question is how we defne the relation between public *education and other societal practices.* In Dietrich Benner's approach to non-affrmative theory, two constitutive principles help to clarify the frst question (pedagogical interaction), while two regulative principles clarify the second question (education and society, see Fig. 5.2). In this section, I frst describe

**Fig. 5.2** 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)

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.

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 defne 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 infuence each other, while also being infuenced 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 infuence of many societal practices, while simultaneously preparing the individual for participation in all of them. Obviously, any political system heavily infuences 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 infuence 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 affrm given policies, the less space there is for critical and studentcentred 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-affrmative 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 refective distance to her previous experiences. Affrmative teaching either aim at conservative transmission or reproduction of existing orders, or at transformative change, led by some predefned educational ideal. In contrast, non-affrmative 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 unrefectively adopt some other predefned 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 refect 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-affrmative 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-affrmative 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 infuencing was possible in the frst place? According to this interpretation, the student seemed to have the last word in deciding how external infuences 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 fnd 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 selfdetermination, but the possibilities to infuence 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 fnal 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 suffce 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 refects 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 infuences force teachers to affrm 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 refect on the meaningfulness of how given knowledge answers the questions it intends.

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-affrmative Interpretation of School Didactics**

In this section, I will discuss how the principles of non-affrmative 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 socializationoriented 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 refection (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-affrmative 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 affrmative and instrumental view of teaching.

The non-affrmative position has occurred in various shapes throughout history. Rousseau, for his part, argued for a position between socialization and transformationoriented 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 infuence, rather negative education wants to avoid the previously described affrmative positions.

We may describe non-affrmative 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 affrmative education. *Reproduction-oriented affrmative education* does not accept negative liberty (freedom from external restraints). Instead, education is seen as non-refective socialization into something existing. In contrast, *education as transformative affrmation* indeed accepts negative liberty by arguing for education as emancipation from primary socialization. However, education as transformative affrmation does not stop here, but moves on arguing in favour of positive emancipation. Positive emancipation defnes what pre-defned future ends education should aim at. Differently expressed, affrmative education that is transformative, aims at replacing primary socialization with some other way of seeing the world, defned in advance. Such a view does not pay attention to the fact that an open society requires subjects able of shared refection and capability to own decision-making regarding the future.

Non-affrmative 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 unrefected positive emancipation, i.e. to lead the learner to a replacing, but predetermined, view of the world, non-affrmative 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-affrmative education is to support the learner to refectively 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 affrmative and non-affrmative education policies typically defend the idea of comprehensive education as mandatory. Some might think this appears contradictory on the part of non-affrmative education. Obviously, accepting education as compulsory indeed limits individual freedom – the individual is not allowed to choose not to learn. However, in non-affrmative education this limitation of individual freedom is legitimate given the aims of schooling, which in a frst 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-affrmative 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-affrmative 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 refect and problematize how *any* form of democracy operates. Political education does not mean to prepare the growing generation following some specifc 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 fnd 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-affrmative position, school didactics argues that education and politics do not have to be super- or subordinated to each other. Consequently, non-affrmative school didactics identifes curricular ideals in a democracy as resulting from a public dialogue involving politics, cultural refection 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-affrmative 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 affrm them. Not to affrm various predefned interests means to not pass them on to the next generation, without making these interests into objects of critical refection in pedagogical practice with students. According to non-affrmative 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 refection of historical, existing, and possible future versions of democracy. Non-affrmative 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-affrmative school didactics supports refective educational practice. This is what contributes to making school's social and pedagogical practice educative.

Compared with affrmative positions, school didactics assumes, with nonaffrmative theory, frst, that the future is open (non-teleological cosmology), second, that the question of morality cannot be fnally 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 fulfl their task in a political democracy, school didactics view *schools as radical locations* for experimental practice and refection. To say that schools are radical locations for refection, does not mean that they are locations for radical refection 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-affrmative 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 refect the questions behind the answers. Of equal importance is to develop the ability to formulate new questions to answer.

As this pedagogy avoids unrefective affrmation (or confrming) 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 refection, but not locations for political radicalisation, if radicalisation refers to affrmation of some predefned political ideology.

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

The second regulative principle in Benner's non-affrmative 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) refected, 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-affrmative 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 specifc 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-affrmative 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 refection. 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 feld 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-affrmative 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.

A dilemma with defending a multilevel perspective is how to connect these various levels conceptually in research. In order to relate non-affrmative 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.

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

**Fig. 5.3** 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)

**Fig. 5.4** 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

practice – education, healthcare, communication, traffc, 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 crossdisciplinary 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, nonaffrmative 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-affrmative 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 fnances. 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-affrmative school didactics argues that non-affrmative 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. Nonaffrmative general pedagogy is also better equipped than the particularist approaches as they aim to combine very different theories. In line with this, non-affrmative 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 signifcant extent mediated by pedagogical qualities of educational leadership. While non-affrmative 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-affrmative 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-affrmative character of summoning and Bildsamkeit embraced as elements of pedagogical leadership?

In other words, non-affrmative 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 refect 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 infuencing 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 nonaffrmative pedagogy (Uljens, 2015; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017; Elo & Uljens, 2022). We believe that such an approach proves valuable when trying to overcome some of the diffculties following from universalist approaches to governance, insensitive for specifcities of education institutions, and diffculties with particularist approaches that indeed do combine separate conceptual languages, yet not very well connected, thus resulting in disparate views.

Non-affrmative school didactics and education theory in general is considered ft 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-affrmative 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 infuences but without affrming them. *Non-affrmative summoning* provides a tool to analyse in what ways and to what extent pedagogic actors, leaders, or institutions affrm 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 affrmative in character, that is, to what extent they require affrmative response.

#### *Using Non-affrmative 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 nonaffrmative school didactics to identify four ideally different education policy positions.

Figure 5.5 identifes, frst, 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 fve decades

**Fig. 5.5** Five decades (1970–2020) of curriculum reform and assessment practices, related to broader political developments. (Following Uljens & Nyman, 2013)

(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 competitionoriented 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-affrmative 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 affrmative education policy challenged an established European post-war Bildung-centred and citizenship-oriented view of human learning and growth, which emphasizes refective identity, personality, character, selfdetermination, 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 refected 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 refecting 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 infuenced 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 qualifcations and competencies like rule following or technical effciency, 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-affrmative 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-specifc 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 felds 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 specifc 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 specifc 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, frst, 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 fnding out how these felds 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 diffcult 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:

Non-affrmative 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, frst, to the individual as not being determined by anything, nor determined to anything but to her freedom. In this respect, the frst 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 infuencing 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 infuences, 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 selfdetermined 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 specifc 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 specifc 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 infuences form a part of the individual's external world. Thus, this concept allows education to operate as an infuence, yet not assuming that external infuences 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 infuences 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 refected 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 affrmative pedagogy) that they should end up at a predetermined form of perception.

A non-affrmative call for self-activity in schools assumes that the study process is guided, by defnition, also by the student's own voice. The teacher's use of communicative provocations as educational actions should deliberately refrain from unproblematic confrmation 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.