Reevaluating Jena-Plan in Reform Pedagogy within its Epoch: Focusing on Koerrenz’s understanding of “Reformpädagogik”

Abstract

This article aims to relativize the thesis raised in the debate over reform pedagogy in Germany that “reform pedagogy cannot offer suggestions for school reform” as a problem concerning the reception of reform programs in reform pedagogy within its epoch, and to clarify what reform pedagogy can offer for school reform. For this purpose, this article focuses on Jena-Plan initiated by Petersen and examines it based on Koerrenz’s understanding of reform pedagogy. Therefore, this article was developed as follows: first, by examining the characteristics of Koerrenz’s understanding of reform pedagogy, the approaches for analyzing reform programs in reform pedagogy within its epoch were presented; second, based on these approaches, Jena-Plan was examined to determine what kind of reform could be considered; and third, the image of Jena-Plan as a school model was relativized.

Through this article, Jena-Plan can offer two suggestions for school reform.

First, this article showed that the Jena-Plan can be understood as proposing didactics of arrangement as a teaching technique, as opposed to the Jena-Plan, which has been understood as a school model. From this, this article pointed out the problem of reception to understand the product of reform pedagogy within its epoch, as a “school model.”

Second, this article showed the importance of school reform being conceived in relation to teacher education. In Petersen’s thought, the concept of reforming schools was linked to that of academic teacher education which develops teachers who would be the driving force in school reform. Therefore, in reform pedagogy, Jena-Plan is worth referring to not only as an exemplary school model, but also as Petersen’s attempt at reforming schools. In other words, as educational reform.

The characteristics of Koerrenz’s understanding of reform pedagogy can be found in his ideology-critical standpoint of how reform is set up. This is suggestive in that it can capture how the “deficit” that justifies reform is engendered in today’s educational reforms, which tend to find an ideal image in something foreign from a perspective that is not necessarily based on the logic of pedagogy. Conversely, under the reform situation in which “updates” and “improvements” are being pressed on the “delays” in the educational system, this article highlighted that the issue for pedagogical research lies in how to find, from a pedagogical perspective, what social reality has a “deficit” that needs to be reformed, and how to draw out the guidelines for reform from the facts of educational practice.