Ph.d. prøveforsvar ved Jonas Teglbjærg

Ph.d.-prøveforsvar 

Ved Ph.d.-studerende: Jonas H. Teglbjærg 

Opponent: Malin Tväråna

Introduction text to trial defense

Deliberative Social Studies Didactics: conceptualizations, conditions, and prevalence is a theoretically and empirically informed research project which aims to systematically study the deliberative quality of discussion processes in Social Studies.

While previous research has centered on the outcomes of discussion in Social Studies, this research project turns its gaze at the quality of discussion processes and the conditions for such processes.

The project focuses on the quality of discussion processes, because (1) deliberative quality is important in its own right (e.g. as an indicator of the extent to which students are treated fairly during discussion), and (2) deliberative quality is often a precondition for democratic outcomes to materialize. If classroom discussions are of low quality, they are less likely to engender the democratic values, knowledge, and participatory skills that Social Studies teachers hope to foster in their students.

To study the quality of discussion processes in Social Studies, the research project draws on procedural deliberative democracy as its theoretical point of departure. Procedural deliberative democracy offers well-grounded quality criteria pertaining specifically to the process of political discussion.

These criteria are used to assess the deliberative quality of Social Studies discussion in the project’s three empirical studies which investigate the prevalence as well as the conditions for deliberative quality. The first centers on the quantity of and conditions for naturally occurring discourse in Nordic social studies classrooms. The second is an intervention study investigating how the deliberative quality of classroom discussion differs across whole-class teacher-directed discussion and group-based student-directed discussion. And the third is an intervention study investigating how the deliberativ quality of classroom discussion depends on the type of opening questioned posed by the teacher, and the theoretical tools presented to students before discussion.

The application of procedural deliberative democracy to Social Studies didactics challenges orthodox approaches to discussion in Social Studies which are anchored in liberal conceptions of democracy and citizenship. As a basis for its empirical studies, the research project, therefore, sets out to formulate a full-fledged and free-standing deliberative Social Studies didactics