Some of them are “illegibly written” and cannot be implemented in practice, according to the statement by the compulsory school teachers’ union on the drafts, whose review period ended on Monday. It would take around 125,000 “miracle wuzzis” for that. The AHS teachers made similar statements.
The new curricula for all subjects in elementary school, middle school and AHS lower level have been in development since 2018 and should apply from 2023/24. Technically, they are ordinances issued by the relevant Minister of Education.
Teachers miss practical relevance
Above all, the compulsory school teachers miss the practical relevance: “For each subject, at least ten practitioners are said to have worked on the content. Apparently, this expertise was not sufficiently taken into account when creating the curriculum, which we not only regret very much, but also has negative effects on the practical will have usability in the classroom.”
In all curricula, a distinction is made between technical, interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary competences. According to the union, the technical skills are “illegibly written” and are in danger of becoming a “best-kept secret”. The teaching of interdisciplinary skills such as motivation, self-awareness and trust in oneself or social and learning method skills, on the other hand, seems “almost impossible” in the currently large classes with children of different nationalities or with different learning requirements.
“difficult to implement”
The educators also found the implementation of 13 interdisciplinary topics in the classroom to be “difficult to implement”. These range from entrepreneurship education to IT and intercultural education, reflective gender education and equality or sex education to traffic education and environmental education for sustainable development.
In general, the compulsory school teacher representatives ask themselves about the practical relevance of some of the formulations in the curriculum: There it says about the general didactic principles: “Teachers see it as their task to perceive and support students individually and to avoid stereotypical admissions and Specifications. Teachers know and use suitable pedagogical diagnostic tools to determine the learning requirements of the students and to be able to accompany their learning processes accordingly. They promote individual learning processes through different and varied learning settings and use suitable learning materials. They give individual, learning-conducive feedback and enable the students to consciously perceive their growth in competence.”
“And that in a class with 25 to 29 students!” write the unionists. The practitioners involved in the curriculum may have lost the practical relevance here, they suspect – “or it is generally assumed that around 125,000 ‘miracle whizzes’ are working in Austria’s schools”.
The AHS teachers’ union argues in a similar way: “The structure into technical, interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary competencies, the abundance of text and the large number of interdisciplinary topics make the curriculum difficult to read. Many of the desired goals seem to us difficult to implement or impractical.”
The AHS teachers rejected the planned entry into force with the school year: It was “impossible that by this time approved textbooks would be available that take the curriculum changes into account”. Under no circumstances should the new curricula lead to extra work – but that is exactly what the specifications in the draft mean.
Source: Nachrichten
