Indoctrinating lessons? – Images of subject teaching in GDR film recordings

If one is interested in schools and teaching in the GDR, one will quickly come across television reports that were produced in East and West Germany in the 1970s and 80s. When excerpts and copies of such programs appear on social media, the comment sections fill with heated discussions about what really went on in the classrooms. This is why Henning Schluß, who worked at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1998, reacted curiously but also cautiously when he was given a magnetic tape that was supposed to show real and explosive GDR lessons in the subject of civics (Staatbürgerkunde). From the end of the 1960s, students from Berlin high schools were taught according to curriculum by teachers, sometimes also by university members, in rooms that were modelled on classrooms. Pedagogically trained technicians and production managers from the so-called pedagogical laboratory filmed and edited in real time. A wide variety of recordings were processed as needed and used in the training of teacher training students. By 2013, Schluß and colleagues had archived and digitized over 300 such recordings from almost all teacher training colleges in the GDR. They are archived at the Education Research Data Centre (Forschungsdatenzentrum Bildung) and can be used for research purposes.

These recordings provide insight into teaching methods that reveal as much about contemporary historical notions of good, normal, and failed teaching and learning as they do about today's assumptions projected onto the videos – with all the socio-political tensions that this entails. However, until now there has been a lack of time, money, data protection know-how and necessary methodological groundwork for the scientific evaluation of a large number of recordings. This is where the project "Indoctrinating lessons? Images of specialist lessons in film recordings from the GDR" comes in, in which a large number of video recordings from the areas of natural sciences, German and foreign languages were viewed for the first time and schooling culture, content and practical references visible in them were placed in their historical context. To this end, documents were consulted that were created, for example, during the production of the videos, but also in the creation of school textbooks, curriculum specifications and the formulation of political demands. Specifically, we looked for major motifs and stories whose references were hotly debated even after the dissolution of the unified socialist education system. How was foreign language teaching portrayed? What was said about the much-praised scientific basis of teaching? How can the talk of exceptionally good science teaching be understood in the context of the recordings?

The project placed particular emphasis on transferring the findings to a wider public. Through lengthy research and work on data protection and archival rights, it was finally possible to make images from the laboratories and excerpts from video material publicly accessible without restrictions, to discuss them with interested parties and to give contemporary witnesses a chance to speak. On this basis, the focus was placed on ideas of scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit) in teaching in the GDR, in particular on working on the myth of progress through science that has developed an unavoidable claim to validity in this context. The second phase of the project, will focus more closely on its elements and counter-narratives, such as the superiority of practical experience and the aesthetic-emotional aspects of flexible creativity. As part of the following project entitled "Classroom Observation and Video Didactics - Dreams of Technology and Progress in a Divided Europe" (Unterrichtsmitschau und Videodidaktika – Träume von Technik und Fortschritt im geteilten Europa), the focus will shift to examine the production conditions of the video recordings, the goals, programs and the circulation of knowledge (Wissenszirkulation) associated with this.