Observed Teaching Practices and Practices of Teacher Observation

Historical Classroom Video Recordings as a Source for Educational Research

Despite the long-established trend of videotaping classes in the context of classroom research or teacher training, it is often forgotten that this practice resonated far beyond its boom in West German teacher training colleges and other academic institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. In a series of research projects at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Vienna, more than 200 of these recordings have been digitised and made accessible through online academic databases in cooperation with the German Institute for International Educational Research. In her lecture, May Jehle will present selected recordings of politics lessons from East, West, and unified Berlin as a relatively new and widely untapped source for historical and comparative educational research.

Using specific examples, Jehle will discuss what these recordings can reveal about teaching methods and practice for the field of historical educational research, which has so far relied heavily on written documents. Taking into account the contexts in which each of these recordings came into being, Jehle will place special focus on the conversational techniques and use of media in the classroom. As these examples also show, the documentary recordings provide information about not only (in this case) specific teaching practices but also the practice of recording itself, since this influenced how the documented events were staged. Drawing on hermeneutics and the sociology of knowledge, the video analysis distinguishes between ‘acts shown’ and ‘the act of showing’, using the examples to demonstrate how frameworks produced on the visual level can be identified and their interpretations made accessible.

May Jehle, MA, is a research fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt under the Chair for Didactics of Social Sciences, with a focus on political education in schools. As a research fellow at the Institute for Educational Sciences, University of Vienna, she was responsible for conducting several research projects from 2011 to 2015 that helped establish and develop the online databases of historical classroom recordings in cooperation with the German Institute for International Educational Research. In her PhD dissertation, she will use this material to present contrasting case studies of lessons on civics and politics in East and West Germany.