GERMAN DIDACTICS AND INCLUSION

Abstract

For us in the "SING" project, inclusive German lessons can only succeed if each child is supported in learning at their individual level and at the same time all pupils have the opportunity to learn together in class. In order to determine the individual level of each child, the current diagnostic practice in German lessons is analyzed together with students and our own diagnostics are developed, which are particularly oriented towards the potentials and not the deficits of pupils. The project also examines the content and objects of German lessons to see how they need to be designed so that many different pupils can develop their skills together.

Both the diagnostic tools and individual learning environments for different subjects in German lessons will be tested at various schools in Dresden. In cooperation with the German teachers there, new approaches for inclusive German lessons will be developed.

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For a long time, inclusive education was primarily considered from an educational perspective. The "SING" project now aims to establish collaborations in a targeted manner that link the subject-specific and vocational didactic perspective with the educational inclusion perspective in order to build up skills for designing inclusive subject teaching among student teachers and to test and further develop inclusive teaching and learning settings together with schools in the Dresden area.

The aim of the project is to design the teaching-learning settings in such a way that the largest possible number of pupils can be accompanied into the zone of next development and can thus cooperate on a subject regardless of previous experience and limitations. If learning processes mainly arise in cooperation with others and the basis for a successful acquisition process is therefore a successful dialog, German didactics takes on a dual role in inclusive didactics. Language (in all its forms - computer-assisted, sign language, spoken language, written language) functions in school and everyday life as the most important means of dialog about objects; language teaching is therefore an essential source of participation in education. At the same time, literature lessons guide meaning-building processes, offer moments of identification for pupils at risk of exclusion and thus opportunities to resume an impaired dialog.

In the research field of German didactics, the subject-specific appropriation objects of language and literature lessons have already been examined for several years with regard to their compatibility with a growing heterogeneity of the student body and in some cases tested in inclusive settings. (The anthologies listed below can serve as examples: Frickel/Kagelmann 2016; Gebele/Zepter 2016; Hennies/Ritter 2014). Subject-specific didactic studies often begin with the examination of objects in German lessons and, in a second step, attempt to shed light on the relevance of these for possible/imagined subjects.

In the "SING" project, a consistent dialogical process with inclusive pedagogy and other specialist disciplines of the project is therefore dedicated to the question of whether object orientation currently enjoys more presence in the subject didactics of German than the concrete subjects. In doing so, the project will address Georg Feuser's criticism that our didactics is upside down and should actually start with the interests and talents of pupils. (Feuser 1989) On the one hand, the project aims to pay greater attention to subject orientation in the planning, implementation and research of German lessons. Since linguistic skills and the guidance of literary meaning-making processes in particular have an important influence on participation in our language-based culture, the "traditional" objects of appropriation in German lessons should not be pushed out of the didactic field of vision.

In order to meet this requirement, the project relies on enriching cooperation with German teachers and their classes. Based on diagnostics that do not focus on the deficits of pupils in relation to an apparent norm, but instead focus on overcoming the deficit orientation in favor of a perception of pupils' abilities and interests in the sense of inclusive education and the recognition of all individuals in a class, subject-didactic objects are to be analyzed and the learning areas of German lessons are to be enriched in such a way that they enable inclusive teaching for each individual learner in a class. This approach of looking at German didactic fields of research through the lens of a competence and ability space of real existing classes also finds its way into university teaching, so that student teachers are offered patterns of action for planning German lessons for heterogeneous classes.