In Germany, civic education is taught as a subject in all types of schools. Even though the subject has a different structure in each of the 16 federal states and the different types of school (focus on politics, different proportions of economics, broad social science approach with politics, sociology and economics, social sciences as an integrated subject including geography and history), there are important didactic principles whose significance for the subject are widely considered consensual: These include the controversial discussion of current problems (didactic principles of actuality, problem-orientation, and controversiality), the promotion of political judgment and the ability to participate as well as the transfer of knowledge, and the expectation that students will not only be able to reproduce content in class, but also to transfer and to problematize it – this is referred to as performance requirements 1-3.
Our hypothesis was that the (partial) school closures during the first Covid-19 wave had far-reaching consequences for the realization of these principles in the teaching of politics. Aiming to identify such changes in the didactic design of civic education, we interviewed civic education teachers by means of a survey. Among other questions, we were interested in the change of the relevance of the central principles of political didactics, the targeted competencies, and the three performance requirements during distance learning. In order to investigate these questions, we conducted an online poll, in which 766 civic education teachers from different school types from all federal states participated from the end of June 2020 to the end of August 2020. We used descrip-tive statistics, hypothesis tests and regression analysis to examine significant differences between subsets of the sample and variable correlations.
The study reveals that in distance learning, the central principles of political didactics, problem-orientation and controversiality, as well as actuality, have become less important in the teachers' perception. This also applies to the promotion of political judgment and the ability to participate. Likewise, a shift in the performance requirements towards reproduction can be observed. Thus, teaching becomes more "instructive" and "informative" and less reflective and problem-solving. These changes differ depending on the school type, the professional experience or the age of the teachers.
In the lecture, these results will be presented and discussed with regard to the question of whether and how the subject-specific educational standards as conditions for good teaching (Klieme 2020) can be realized in distance learning. In this context, Anja Besand's (2000)distinction between hidden curriculum and collateral learning (Dewey) can be taken up.
Besand, Anja 2020: The crisis as an opportunity to learn. Or: ‘Collateral civic education’ in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. An essay in times of crises, in: Journal of Social Science Education, Vol. 19, S I, DOI 10.4119/jsse-3488, pp. 8-14.
Klieme, Eckhard 2020: Guter Unterricht – auch und besonders unter Einschränkungen der Pandemie?, in: DDS – Die Deutsche Schule Beiheft 16, pp. 117–135.
