Author: Slavík, J., Janík, T.
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The article presents analysis of the content, scope and operational functions of the terms „fact“ and „phenomenon“ in theories of subject didactics. The aim is to clarify the use of these terms above all with a view to their operationalisation for empirical research on educational praxis.
The analysis of the relationship between the concepts of „phenomenon“ and „fact“ enables subject didactics to offer theoretical explanations of the reality of teaching and learning based on the pupil‘s experience, i.e. on his pre-understanding of the teaching material. His experience depends on the phenomena that he has encountered in life and phenomena are also the essential starting point for scientific or artistic treatment in specialised fields, and analogically teaching subjects.
The authors define a fact as a „relatively verifiable partial result of getting to know a phenomenon and one that is bound to a particular place and time“. For subject didactics the in-principle epistemological difference between the two terms is the es-sential condition for analysis of the relations between the pupil‘s spontaneous experience and the learning related to it in the academic sphere of the subject. It is also the essential condition for the formulation of subject didactic theories supporting empirical research.
For subject didactics in the what is known as the „communication conception“, empirical-research facts are so-called struc-tures of semantic expression (i.e. verbal, material, kinetic or other representations of content) realised during teaching. The use of a structure of expression is evidence of the conception of a certain content on the side of its originator - author (pupil, teacher, scientist, artist). For teaching, the only kind of structure of expression that is useful is the kind of structure of expression that does not go beyond the border of the „semantic channel“ connecting the performance of the pupil with the analogical performance of the expert in the given field The authors introduce the term „distance of the structure of expression“, to suggest that the greater this distance the harder it is to make the didactic connection between the pupil‘s experience and the analogical performance of the expert.
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