Elementary School Workshop - Pedagogical Laboratory

Since its foundation, the Elementary School Workshop has been firmly anchored in teacher education in Kassel and has been able to establish itself as a special teaching and learning space. Especially due to its anchoring as a university learning space, the elementary school workshop has special potential for the professionalization of future teachers, since scientific knowledge (theoretical, empirical, systematic) and practical (action) knowledge (materials and media studies, design of learning environments, observation and support of learning processes) can be linked or related to each other.

In the elementary school workshop, different seminars take place on the topics of discovery learning, school development, case analyses, scenic play, learning material analyses, didactic writing, observations in open learning situations, etc., which are conducted in different formats (two- and four-hour seminars, weekend seminars, project seminars over two semesters).

From the beginning of their studies, students can develop first simple, then increasingly complex didactic learning situations in these seminars along self-selected topics, in which they learn for themselves how presuppositional teaching is if specific learning is to be initiated for children. Namely, learning in which children learn in as many dimensions as possible and are able to exploit their learning potential.

The Kassel Elementary School Workshop sees itself as a didactic laboratory in which the conditions and possibilities of learning are examined in relation to learning situations and personal and institutional framework conditions, and a connection is established between teaching and learning processes.

A wide variety of learning and visual materials from the learning areas of elementary school are available for this active process of examination (cf. the following overview).

The materials are arranged thematically, exhibited and arranged with a high call character for discoveries and own activities. Among other things, they have haptic and aesthetic qualities, are memory anchors to one's own past or model-forming for the implementation of one's own ideas. In any case, they provide access to the learning ideas they contain, the meaning of which is (re)constructed, analyzed and made accessible for learning processes.

In addition, the elementary school workshop provides ideas in the form of accompanying materials, didactic instructions or descriptions of the potential of things, or develops these together with students, in order to create a basis for further independent material analyses, developments and tests.

Starting from the search for the potentials of things and the implicit learning potentials, the work in the elementary school workshop supports the students in,

• to develop questions about learning arrangements and to clarify them experimentally,
• to focus on learning processes and to make them visible,
• to test theoretical assumptions about learning development, about self-determination and motivation, about illustration, modeling, and cognitive representation,
• to find out how open forms of communication can be established and how cooperative learning settings can be created,
• to experience and test alternative ways of acting and thinking, and to recognize and implement methodological scope,
• to set up investigation settings with children and to develop observation instruments in order to be able to carry out investigations.

In this way, the collected material world enables students to actively engage with forms of learning and teaching and thus opens up scope for experimental action, thinking, planning and reflection, which also allow for aberrations, errors, etc. and can be recorded, analyzed and adjusted in retrospect via targeted reflection processes. Precisely because of these conditions, there are at the same time spaces of possibility and scope for undreamt-of creativity as well as thinking and acting in alternatives.