Når innovation og fagligt samspil saetter fag under pres

fagdidaktisk kommunikation i det danske gymnasium efter reformen i 2005

Abstract

After the 2005 reform of the Danish gymnasium, it has become a requirement that students are trained in interdisciplinarity and that their innovative skills are developed. In the public discussion “innovation” has been embedded in two different discourses: a market oriented discourse and a citizenship oriented discourse. This study examines whether the school subjects under this pressure develop and converge into one unified school subject: a market orientated social science. This is examined through a case study of an interdisciplinarian course in the first year of the Danish gymnasium on Corporate Social Responsibility. The students first work with this topic in the context of English, Social Science and Innovation, and then have to advise a Danish concern about how to improve and develop the CSR-strategy of one of its subsidiary companies in India.

The data of the study are central documents from political level, from the level of the Ministry of Education, and from the course. These documents are triangulated with interviews with teachers and students. The results of the study are based on a discourse analysis of these documents.

The central finding of the study is that the different school subjects do not converge into one market oriented school subject. The students do not limit themselves to give instrumental and means-oriented advices to the concern about how they can use the CSR-strategy as a mean of increasing its profits. The teachers act in a paradigm of challenge oriented didactics. The teachers establish a subject oriented and interdiscipline oriented didactical discussion about how the school subjects in different ways can contribute to a professional debate about epochal core problems (in this course: the enviroment and social inequality), and the students discuss how the subsidiary company can contribute to the solution of these problems. They add that these initiatives will benefit the company. Thus, through didactical reflection and the planning and execution of a course the teachers re-contextualize the requirement about interdisciplinarity and innovation in a way that has Bildungs-Potenzial.