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54 EINBLICKE
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Christina Huff and Larissa Greinert leave the Teaching-
Learning-Laboratory for physics education satisfied. "It all
worked out fine", is their brief comment to their supervisor.
Christina and Larissa are working on their Master‘s thesis, in
which they ask experienced physics teachers about their con-
ceptions and ideas regarding experiments for physics lessons.
What "worked out" was the interview outline which the two
teacher students developed together: it was understandable
and practicable for real interviews.They hope to use it to carry
out a detailed examination of the conscious and unconscious
decisions teachers make when selecting experiments for use
in class.
This basic research is aimed at helping to establish teacher
education and also advanced teacher education for in-service
teachers on a more empirical foundation. However it often
takes between 15 to 20 years for innovations in the education
system to be put into practice in the classroom.Nevertheless,
newapproaches are urgently needed in schools and in lessons
because educational requirements are changing:schools need
to prepare students for a diversified society and to teach them
to act responsibly with regard to the climate and resources.
Moreover, students need to acquire the skills needed for
building a flexible career path. The ministers of educational
and cultural affairs decided as early as 2004 that instruction
should no longer focus exclusively on imparting subject
matter knowledge. That alone was a major undertaking in
view of the increased amount of knowledge available in the
sciences and society today.But students should also be able to
apply this knowledge to generate new knowledge,evaluate it
and communicate it. With this swing towards "competence-
oriented" teaching the same tenet applies to today‘s education
system as it did in Ancient Rome: Tempora mutantur et nos
mutamur in illis – Times change and we change with them.
Research is a key basis for further advances in teacher educa-
tion, and at University of Oldenburg this research is practice-
oriented and theory-driven.The center for teacher education
at the university (Didaktisches Zentrum) strongly supports the
coordination of this research. However the real driving force
for changes in school lessons can only be the teachers them-
selves. In addition to all the formal requirements, theymust be
able to deal with challenges to their own self-image. On the
one hand they must understand that lessons need to focus
primarily on the learner and the learning processes. Domain-
specific educational research has demonstrated that teachers
are still overly inclined to organise their lessons as a series of
teaching processes and focus too much on the structure of
Teaching − A Lifelong Learning Process
Public perceptions of the profession of teachers vary widely, ranging from the "part time job" and the image of
the overtaxed, small-time schoolteacher to the universal academic who is social worker and parent substitute
at the same time. The rather more fact-based research carried out by the educational researchers at Oldenburg
deals with the question of how pre-service and in-service teachers learn. Because even without the polemics, the
profession of teachers is a challenging one.
Der Autor
The author
Prof. Dr. Michael Komorek ist Physikdidaktiker an der Universität
Oldenburg. Nach seiner Habilitation, die mit einem Stipendium der
Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) gefördert wurde, vertrat
er eine Professur für Physikdidaktik an der Universität Dortmund.
Seine Forschungsaktivitäten beziehen sich auf kontext-basierten
Physikunterricht, auf die Didaktische Rekonstruktion von Lehr-Lern-
Prozessen, auf die Untersuchung von Prozessen der Lehrerpro-
fessionalisierung, auf das Lernen an außerschulischen Lernorten
und auf den Beitrag der Physikdidaktik zur Bildung für nachhaltige
Entwicklung. Er ist Sprecher des Promotionsprogramms ProfaS und
des Projekts Energiebildung und leitet das Schülerlabor physiXS. Er
ist Vizedirektor des Didaktischen Zentrums der Universität Oldenburg
und Mitglied im Vorstand der BNE-Agentur Niedersachsen e.V..
Prof. Dr. Michael Komorek is Professor of Physics Education at the
University of Oldenburg.After his habilitation,whichwas fundedwith
a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG), he accepted
a professorship of physics education at TU Dortmund University. His
research activities focus on context-based physics education, the Educational Reconstruction of teaching-learning processes, examining the
learning processes involved in professional teacher education, learning in non-school environments and the contribution of physics education
to education for sustainable development. He is the spokesman for the graduate programme ProfaS and the project Energy Education and
director of the teaching-learning laboratory physiXS. He is deputy director of the Center of Teacher Education (Didaktisches Zentrum) at the
University of Oldenburg and board member of the BNE-Agentur Niedersachsen e.V.