INCLUSION IN CHEMISTRY LESSONS
Table of contents
Abstract
The project seeks to make the content of chemistry, which is essential for understanding the environment, accessible to all. To this end, it engages extensively with learners to understand how aspects of the subject can be made tangible to them. Based on this understanding, teaching and learning settings are then designed to enable everyone to learn and understand together. To this end, seminar groups will observe school classes in various learning situations in order to understand how pupils learn best. This knowledge can then be used to design teaching and learning opportunities that are adapted as precisely as possible to the class.
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If inclusive education is understood and advocated as an essential human right and an objective to be implemented in the classroom, we are often confronted with its so-called limits in dialog with educational institutions and individuals or critics. In addition to general concerns about educating all children together, these seem to be particularly subject-specific. Basic scientific and chemical education in particular is often considered too complex and too questionable in terms of safety, so that, for example, the subject of chemistry does not appear in the educational plans of special schools with a focus on intellectual development, but at most scientific phenomena are announced as lesson content (Hoffmann/Menthe 2015). As a result, chemical education, which is an essential prerequisite for understanding animate and inanimate nature and the living world, becomes an educational luxury that only the privileged can enjoy. Of course, this cannot go hand in hand with the claim of a general education.
Furthermore, the close logical interconnection of chemical subject content and the seemingly inflexible arrangement resulting from this sometimes appears to be an obstacle to teaching heterogeneous or inclusive learning groups. In fact, however, the phenomenological approach to the world,
which is the basis of the subject of chemistry, offers precisely the variety of different content-related, methodological and emotional approaches that are essential for inclusive teaching based on cooperation, dialog and a common learning object. The experiment as an essential form of scientific work is an element that stimulates learning and motivation and provides a variety of differentiation options. Counter-arguments that point to safety risks when experimenting can be countered by selecting and preparing the experiments appropriately.
As part of the project, options for chemistry-specific and inclusive educational diagnostics will be designed and evaluated in seminars with student teachers. Based on an improved understanding of the learning subjects, teaching concepts will then be developed and tested that aim to take into account the individual needs of the learners and offer approaches (e.g. motivational, methodological, teaching and learning psychology) to the common learning object. In this way, all learners should be enabled to succeed within their zone of further development. The difficulty here lies in taking into account the identified learner profiles in their diversity when planning teaching and learning settings.
The aim of the project is to contribute to the understanding of how the path from crystalline to fluid concepts, which enable and catalyze joint learning in dialogue and cooperation, can be designed with equal consideration of the identified approaches. The selection of relevant content and methods as well as their necessary differentiation is based on approaches from the didactics of chemistry as well as the didactically reflected mediation claim of this science. This is based on the concept of "scientific literacy", which essentially states that scientific subjects can primarily impart a kind of problem-solving competence that includes aspects such as logical thinking and argumentation, critical hypothesis testing and planning competence, which are elementary components of a self-sufficient human being and must be prioritized accordingly in teaching.