Storyline method

The storyline method is an action-oriented approach to teaching, with a focus on the primary and secondary I. The focus of the - mostly interdisciplinary - Emphasis is placed on practical and creative self-activity of the students. The students in the classroom create their own meaningful reality in the form of pictures, models, texts, technical drawings, timelines, work plans, etc. By addressing these representations they acquire active knowledge and skills.

Storyline teaching treats an important topic for the students to which they bring ideas and experiences from their everyday lives. The topic is like a story divided into chapters. The students are studying the most by producing something: models, where they discover relationships that were not previously known to them. These models should not only be plausible and logical, but also aesthetically pleasing as possible. Therefore, it is often the creative actions of the students - drawing, painting, music, mime, etc. - integrated into the classroom. At the same time the most important cultural techniques are at almost every step, practiced and deepened. At the start of the examination of a topic so are the ideas, experiences, ideas and assumptions of students not be given by the teacher or by the media. Life-world experience and background of the students are taken seriously and form the basic material for independent learning. Mutual respect is the lived by teachers and by students alike unclaimed attitude of this educational approach.

Behind every lesson, which may extend over several weeks, is a story, a story that is developed over a long period step by step. So the lesson follows a theme, a line, hence the name story line. Each step along this line begins with a so-called key question. These are not questions of knowledge to which there is a simple right or wrong answer; Key questions can be answered only by rather Consider trying out or discovering contexts. It will not, for example, asked where penguins live, but it is asked how the organism of a penguin must be constituted so that it can survive in an inhospitable region. By the students to answer such a question before their current knowledge background, their own picture of reality, which then subsequently compare to the callable from reference books, encyclopedias, the Internet or from the teacher create knowledge. Lessons after the storyline approach corresponds most closely to the extent systemic-constructivist view of learning (see constructivist didactics).

The Storyline approach was in the sixties of the 20th century at the Jordan Hill College of Education (now University of Strathclyde ) developed in Glasgow and is now used in more than 30 countries. Pioneers were Steve Bell, Sallie Harkness and Fred Rendell, who developed this form of teaching and understanding their underlying in cooperation with numerous educational practitioners and further developed. The Storyline approach is widely used, especially in the Scandinavian countries. He was promoted by the European Association for Educational Design ( EED) on. The first two international conferences organized by the EED to the storyline method took place in Denmark in 2000 and 2003. The third international conference in late October, carried out in 2006 in Glasgow, the fourth in 2009 in Oregon, USA. Since the storyline approach now also finds application beyond Europe, the EED was renamed at this conference in " storyline International".