Improving the quality of literature teaching in schools

Dr Florian Hesse from Friedrich Schiller University Jena focused on the quality of literature teaching in schools in his doctoral thesis. On Monday (16 September), the current postdoc at the Chair of German Language and Literature Education at the University of Jena will receive the German Didactics Award, endowed with 5,000 euros, at the 25^th Symposium on German Didactics in Mainz.

"This is a great success for German didactics in Jena," said a delighted Prof. Dr Iris Winkler. Florian Hesse sees the award as confirmation of his assumption "that systematically gained insights into everyday literature lessons can be extremely informative". This applies in particular to student teaching: "Not only have the practical phases in teacher training programmes been continuously expanded in recent years. In view of the shortage of teachers, more and more students are already teaching independently in schools during their studies." Insights into the teaching of prospective teachers are therefore of enormous importance in order to recognise strengths and weaknesses in teaching and to be able to work on them in the future as part of teacher training.

How student teachers organise literature lessons

Hesse's dissertation "Qualitäten von Literaturunterricht. Eine Videostudie im Praxissemester" (Qualities of literature teaching. A video study during the practical semester), which has already been honoured with a doctoral thesis prize from the University of Jena this year, was recently published by Metzler in open access format in the German Didactics series. In it, the 29-year-old researcher explores the question of how qualities of literature teaching can be modelled theoretically and how student teachers design literature lessons during their school placement semester. In this context, he developed and validated a comprehensive rating instrument with which he systematically analysed 22 video-recorded lessons.

This convinced the seven-member jury of the award, who considered the quantitative-explorative work to be a "pioneering achievement in literature didactic teaching research". The jury is convinced "that the theoretically sound, empirically validated and practically extremely valuable quality model for teaching literature forms the starting point for further scientific work in German didactics and also provides impetus for university teaching in the field of teacher training".

The prize is awarded every two years by Symposion Deutschdidaktik e. V. to outstanding young academics in this field.