School Didactics And Learning: a school Didactic Model Framing An Analysis of Pedagogical Implication of Learning Theory

who
the subject is and even more important to observe 
why
he is acting as a teacher in an
institutionalized school. If we want to understand the relation between the collective curriculum and the
individual teacher’s intentions, we must acknowledge the problem of commitment. This argument may thus
be seen as an additional aspect of Kansanen’s (1993b) argumentation of deontological ethics and its
relevance to understanding the internalization of collective goals.
A second comment concerning the otherwise valuable model described above is connected to the problem
of responsibility. When we try to explicate the teacher’s intentional activity in the institutionalized school, it
is necessary to reflect on the relation between the teacher’s rights and obligations with respect to both the
curriculum (collective) and the individual. Kansanen’s approach is structurally effective and valuable, but
its point of departure seems to be primarily the curriculum, not the individual student. Let me develop this
point.
We noted at the beginning of this study that attending the institutionalized school is one of the ways in
which an individual grows into society. Often the school is conservative in that it educates subjects to
become members of the existing community; schooling is a way of upholding and preserving the
8. CLOSING THOUGHTS AND PERSPECTIVES
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community. Yet we must remember that students partly themselves decide about their participation. We also
know that pupils or a group of students can easily ruin a lesson or a course if they do not accept the contract
proposed by the teacher or the educational system of which they are a part. Thus the students’ interest
cannot be neglected.
This is not to say that there is or could be some kind of symmetry between students’ and teachers’
intentions in institutionalized education. That kind of symmetry is in principle not possible in an
institutionalized school like the Nordic comprehensive school—the teachers’ moral obligation towards the
collective makes this impossible. The teacher is an authorized gatekeeper. This is the reason why a therapist
model of teaching (Fenstermacher & Soltis, 1986, pp. 23 ff) is also insufficient in understanding teaching in
institutionalized education.
This actualizes an additional fundamental aspect of the relation between students and the individual teacher
that I want to stress—the teachers’ moral obligations towards the students. We may in fact take
the students’ interests and needs as the point of departure in addition to the intentions behind the
curriculum. We may, in other words, interpret the students’ interests as a kind of curriculum. Applying the
kind of deonto-logical reasoning discussed above, the teacher could internalize these interests and needs. In
other words, the teachers could accept them as legitimate and reasonable; taking the students’ needs and
interests into consideration would be a kind of moral obligation to be fulfilled by the teacher in the same
sense as the collective curriculum would be seen as a responsibility. As a consequence, teleological ethics
then offers us the possibility of discussing the teacher’s intentions and analysing the consequences of the
teacher’s activity in terms of students’ learning results; the teacher who manages to help the students to
learn what 
they
want to learn has succeeded.
Making use of the distinction between intentional and purposive teaching we may conclude that if the
teacher’s intentions are based on students’ interests, then we can talk not only about the teacher’s
intentional activity but of his purposive activity with respect with the students’ intentions. Purposiveness
here means a unification of the teacher’s individual intentions with external goals, in this case the students’
interests. The conclusion is that the principal structure proposed by Kansanen (1993b) is considered
valuable in that students’ interests may be conceived of as functioning as moral obligations for the teachers’
intentions in the same sense as the collective curriculum.
The position adopted in the model presented in this study is that both these lines of argumentation are
legitimate. Restricting ourselves to only one of them leads to problems. Kansanen’s (1993b) model reminds
us of the existence of the national curriculum and the boundaries imposed by it. I take this to mean that
when conceptual systems in didactics are developed, this fact must be taken into account. However, limiting
ourselves to the curriculum means that we may forget the student as an intentional subject. Thus, adopting
the principal structure of Kansanen’s (1993b) reasoning but extending it in the above described sense, we
reach a position like the one visualized in 
Fig. 8.1
.