General Subject Didactics

General Subject Didactics

In October 2024, the University of Vienna established the world's first professorship for General Subject Didactics, thereby establishing the ‘General Subject Didactics’ department at the Centre for Teacher Education.

General subject-specific didactics can be defined as the ‘theory of subject-specific didactics’ (Rothgangel 2021). It observes and reflects on how individual subject-specific didactics research subject-specific teaching and learning. In this way, theories on very different topics of subject-specific didactic research can be worked out, which at the same time take into account the similarities and differences between the respective subject-specific didactics.

The emergence of general specialised didactics was due in particular to the fact that research and recent developments in specialised didactics were insufficiently addressed in general didactics (Rothgangel 2016). For this reason, the Gesellschaft für Fachdidaktik (GFD) formed the working group ‘Allgemeine Fachdidaktik’ in 2009, which finally published the first volume ‘Auf dem Weg zu einer Allgemeinen Fachdidaktik’ (Bayrhuber et al., 2016) in 2016.

Significant empirical findings and further theoretical development were compiled in the second volume, in which 17 specialised didactics from German-speaking countries were compared with each other on the basis of six impulses (e.g. origins and developments of specialised didactics; perspectives of specialised didactics research and development) (Rothgangel et al., 2020). The rapid spread of general subject didactics since then can be recognised by the fact that a second edition of the second volume (Rothgangel et al., 2021) was required within a year and that only eight years after the first book publication on general subject didactics, this theory is also attracting a great deal of international attention (Vollmer & Rothgangel, 2024).

The establishment of General Subject Didactics at the University of Vienna is intended to promote dialogue specifically between the subject didactics departments based at the ZLB and between the educational sciences in general.