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

The Teacher’s Responsibility Towards the Student.
The student’s participation in the pedagogical process
always has a different status and role compared to that of the teacher—it is always asymmetrical. The first
is the difference between the teacher’s and the learner’s experience and competence in a certain field.
A second question concerning the subjects’ (teacher and learner) interaction in an educational situation is
the seemingly simple question of 
why
they participate at all. Is it of their own free will or are they obliged?
It is important to remember that the condition on which the actors are present is a key question in
understanding the difference between different types of pedagogical situations. The reasons why teachers
appear as teachers in public schools, as soccer trainers or as leaders of religious groups are generally
different. In the institutionalized school, but also elsewhere, this is related to the teachers’ formal position as
gatekeepers; they have been given the right and responsibility to examine whether or not an individual has
reached a certain standard or type of competence.
A third, related difference (or absence of difference) is age. The difference concerning experience and
competence is hopefully always present. All of the implications of the difference in age cannot be discussed
here; it is only acknowledged that the teacher’s educative role diminishes in proportion to the student’s
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increasing age. The ethics of this relation include the optimization of the student’s participation in relation
to their interests, abilities, motivation and personality (see Kansanen & Uusikylä, 1983).
The heart of this problem lies in the fact that the teacher in an institutionalized school is an employee who
is in charge of the community. Teachers have to decide the extent to which they are ready to accept the
values behind the curriculum. The collective, responsible for the national curriculum, must in turn decide
what kind and what degree of deviation is accepted. In other words, as long as teachers operate between the
curriculum and the individual, teachers are responsible to both, but for different reasons. A fundamental
question then is to what extent teachers accept the collective goals, as well as to what extent and on what
conditions students accept or internalize the goals set up by the teacher and the collective (Koskenniemi &
Hälinen, 1970, p. 92).
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The Existential Dimension.
The nature of interaction is constitutive of the social climate in a pedagogical
situation and is in itself educating. This is something which can only partially be planned, and is even more
seldom explicitly evaluated, but which often belongs to the experiences students are affected by for the rest
of their lives. Van Manen (1991) has shown that an essential dimension of the student-teacher interaction
may be approached through the concept of pedagogical tact (also Ottelin, 1931, p. 70). His understanding of
the notion offers possibilities of handling the existential dimensions of the pedagogical process.
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Pedagogical tact is partly constituted of a teacher’s sensibility to and respect for the growing child’s
personal integrity and the teacher’s ability to act so that this is not violated during the process or as a
consequence of the pedagogical process (Lehtovaara, 1992). It may also be that some aesthetic concepts can
be used in order to capture this existential dimension of the pedagogical meeting.
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The existential aspect of the model is influenced by humanistic psychology (Rogers, 1969) and its view
of education. This branch of psychology offers us possibilities for reflecting on the existential dimensions
of the participating individuals’ experiences. The existential view supports the view of the learner and
teacher as intentional subjects. However, even though the teacher’s role is to support an individual’s
personal growth, the present position does not accept a therapist approach to describing the pedagogical
process. The reason is that the teacher in the institutionalized school represents the collective in the
pedagogical process. Naturally the teacher has a considerable degree of freedom, but to imagine that she
could act as the students’ advocate with respect to the interests expressed by the community or the state is
pedagogical naivety.
A final aspect of interaction is related to how teachers’ and students’ intentional and interactional activity
can lead to the desired goal. The relation between student and teacher activity was discussed in some detail
with respect to learning in 
Chapter 2
. Some of the main conclusions were:
1. It is relevant to call an activity teaching even though it does not result in learning;
2. It is possible to identify study activity even if learning does not occur as a result of this process;
3. The effect of a teacher’s instructional activity is mediated by the learner’s conceptualization of the
process and their intentional activity;
4. The cultural and social contract concerning instructional activity in the institutionalized school partly
defines the participants’ roles in the process. This presupposes that the uninterested learner is sometimes
treated as an intentional learner;
5. A teacher’s activity cannot be made empirically dependent on a student’s intentions as this would lead
to the conclusion that a teacher teaches only those learners who intend to learn;
6. Nor can students’ study activity be made dependent on the teacher’s intentions and activities as it is not
reasonable to say that only those students that are being taught are the ones engaged in an intentional
studying process. In addition, the learner’s intentions may differ from the teacher’s, consciously or by
3. A MODEL OF SCHOOL DIDACTICS
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mistake, and, second, the student can try to learn without being taught, i.e. by being engaged in a self-
directed study process.
The intentional and interactional features of the pedagogical process are also brought to mind by the fact
that the participating subjects in a pedagogical process, the teacher and the learner, may be described in
similar terms. Both carry out intentional acts and these acts are deter mined by the participants’ rights,
obligations, wishes and abilities, etc. In this respect the TSL process is a “dialogical” one (Hintikka, 1982).
EVALUATION
In the present model evaluation is given a quite distinctive role. The reason for this is the descriptive nature
of the model—it aims at being valid for the institutionalized TSL process. This pedagogical reality cannot
be truly understood without accepting evaluation as a fundamental category. However, a problematic
question is whether the concept of evaluation should be equated with concepts like intention and interaction
as they are understood in this model. The problem is whether evaluation can be seen as an independent
concept or whether it should be subordinated with respect to intentionality. The position taken in this study
is that the concept of pedagogical intentionality cannot be correctly understood without reference to
evaluation. It may thus be that the concept of intentionality may sometimes be correctly understood
irrespective of evaluative reflection, though it appears that this aspect is not dispensable in understanding
pedagogical intentionality.
Some further notes concerning how evaluation is understood here are adduced.
A differentiation similar to that in planning (P) can be made with respect to evaluative activities (E). First
there is the continuous situated evaluation during the teaching process (E3). Second there is the teacher’s
evaluation after different kinds of pedagogical sequences in relation to the classroom and school as contexts
(E2b) and in relation to the evaluation on the collective level (E2a). Evaluation after a sequence covers both
evaluation of the students’ results in relation to the goals and the teacher’s evaluation of their own activities
for instance regarding the choice of relevant content, form of representation, etc. Finally, E1 refers to
evaluation on the collective level (e.g. national evaluation of school achievement).
As in the case of teachers’ planning, there is reason to make a distinction between the 
kind
of evaluation
teachers make continuously as a part of the instructional or educational process (E3) and the kind of
evaluation teachers make after having finished a pedagogical sequence (E2a, b). It might be reasonable to talk
about teachers’ formative evaluative activity during the process and their summing-up evaluation after
having finished the process.
With regard to the teacher, we may say that not only the teacher’s own evaluation of the students’
achievements influence the teacher’s activities, but naturally also systematic evaluations made on the
collective level may have the same function. The impact of external evaluative activities varies along with
the type of external evaluation. For example, in cases where the possibility of a student continuing his
education is regulated by success in external tests, teachers’ evaluative activity plays a subordinate role.
When strict external evaluation is carried out, it is likely that the teacher brings the teaching into line with
the standards imposed by external authorities. This is also the reason why teachers’ professional status
partly depends on what success the students have in collective annual tests carried out by an authority
outside the school. External evaluation therefore naturally affects the school culture.
This clearly shows that the pedagogical work in a school is affected by the cultural function the grades
have outside the school. The more important the grades are outside the school, the more the teacher is
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controlled. This mechanism also gives teachers instruments to control students by reminding them that the
teacher is the collective’s representative in the classroom.
Concerning evaluation on the collective level, we can distinguish between systematic and occasional
evaluation. Occasional evaluation refers to national or international summing-up evaluations of students’
academic achievements or the like made for some specific casual reason. An example of systematic
evaluation is the annual Finnish matriculation examination at the end of upper secondary school
(gymnasium). The content of this examination is decided by a special national committee which is
appointed for this purpose and also evaluates the results.
Finally we have the students’ evaluation and self-evaluation of their activities and the teachers’ support,
goals, contents, etc. However, the students’ evaluative reflection primarily occurs on the E3-level, but also
outside the school. This is pedagogically relevant as the students’ evaluation outside the school in fact may
influence future pedagogical activity indirectly, in that parents or the community are made aware of how the
pedagogical activities have appeared to the students.
In sum, there are (at least) five important perspectives on evaluation which are of importance to the
pedagogical situation: (a) the teachers’ different forms of evaluation, (b) the collective evaluation of
achievements, (c) the function of grading in the culture outside the school community, including continuing
education and the labour market and finally, (d) the social psychological function of grading (Kallós, 1989;
Lundgren, 1989) and (e) the students’ evaluation.
The final comment concerning evaluation of the pedagogical process is related to the individual student’s
rights and obligations to participate in this process. In the figure presented earlier concerning the forms and
levels of pedagogical activity, it was claimed that students in institutional school settings often are in a quite
weak position with respect to evaluation of their own achievements. 
In the present model, both students and teachers, as well as the instructional organization as a whole, are
conceived of as responsible for the students’ achievements. It should be obvious to everybody that if
students are made partly responsible for the learning outcomes, they must necessarily be conceived of as
intentional learners. It makes no sense to conceive of the relation between teaching and learning as a causal
relation and then hold only students responsible for the results of the TSL process. Thus, when students are
given the responsibility for their success, this includes a view of the learner as an intentional subject.
CONTEXTS
In the present model the learners are identified not only as active intentional subjects in the pedagogical
situation but also as subjects representing part of the local community surrounding the school. This fact is
thus an additional way in which the local context is acknowledged by the teacher. The students simply bring
the local context into the classroom.
It is also useful to reflect on the context within which the students act because it is radically different from
the teacher’s context. The students’ context is constituted of those possibilities and limitations that delimit
the students’ learning space in the school situation. The organization of the school, the local school culture
as well as the individual teachers define this space (Arfwedson, 1986; Mercer, 1993, 1995). The classroom
and school as a learning environment should not be overlooked as a historically developed context defining
the individual student’s possibilities of participation in different pedagogical processes (including choosing
content, working methods, planning the school year, etc.) (Simola, 1995, pp. 108, 114; Terhart, 1989, pp.
57–60). Observe, however, that even though the historicity of the TSL process is emphasized, this does not
in any way reduce the student’s role in constructing the context for themself. In an important respect the
meaning of the context is constructed by the student although it is first shaped by tradition and the teacher.
3. A MODEL OF SCHOOL DIDACTICS
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In an institutionalized pedagogical process the student steps, in a manner of speaking, into an intended
context. But the experienced context does not have to coincide with the intended context. We will return to
this question in discussing the curriculum as intended and experienced.
The local school culture in turn is affected by the traditions of the school and teachers’ beliefs concerning
education and values. As Koskenniemi and Hälinen (1970, p. 92) remind us, it is also important to
acknowledge the peer students as a most influential factor in this respect. 
The second self-evident context for the students is the local culture and the home background. As
numerous empirical studies have shown, this context is of great educational importance and must therefore
be considered important from a pedagogical perspective, even though its impact is indirect. On a general
level, and with reservations that cannot be discussed here, the phenomenological concept of lifeworld may
be used in discussing the student’s context (Lippitz, 1984; Uljens, 1992a, pp. 29–31).
When didactics is discussed the didactic triangle