| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
This Master thesis takes an aim at discussing students’ understanding of exemplary teaching as preparatory for their future vocational work practice. The main purpose is to offer a closer look at how students can connect theoretical learning content to future work practice and understand how it can apply to them, through Wolfgang Klafki’s theories on the Principle of the Exemplary in Teaching. This study also considers Ilmi Willbergh’s term Mimetic Didactics, seen in by extension of Klafki’s theories on exemplary teaching. It investigates how Mimetic Didactics can contribute to students’ imagination in picturing how general learning content can affect them and their vocational practice in the future. The study discusses how instructional teaching can be understood through Klafki’s Didactic Analysis, and further as a framework for merging theoretical content with practical meaning, through Bildung-Centered General Didactics. The discussion must be seen in correspondence with certain Governmental aims for educational development, through school curriculum and various reforms. The discussion considers whether exemplary teaching in vocational high schools can help illuminate how Bildung-Centered General Didactics may facilitate students’ independence in the acquisition of content as meaningful to them.
The study’s method involves qualitative analysis of data from non- participatory observation of classroom teaching, and semi-structured interviews with four students from one second grade high school class. The collection of data has been carried out in one Norwegian Vocational High School, which specializes in vocational training in various subjects. The students interviewed are training to become children and youth workers within various educational institutions in Norway. The results and analysis of the data collected from observation and student interviews, show how students seem to prefer exemplary teaching with aesthetic expressions, to theoretical lectures. The students associate quality in teaching with the use of specific examples as representatives for general content because they are better able to understand how future practice may apply to them. The specific examples appeal to their previous experiences, or to their imagination for future situations not yet experienced. | |
