Curriculum Dynamics within and across Contexts

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Sources
• (In Order of Appearance)
• Preface
• Tracing Curriculum Dynamics within and across Contexts. An Introduction to Stefan Thomas Hopmann’s work (Kirsten Sivesind & Wieland Wermke)
• Stefan Thomas Hopmann’s Professional Life and Work Degrees
• Professional Positions
• Research Projects and Collaborations
• Didaktik Meets Curriculum
• Comparative Curriculum Studies
• Nordic Didactics and Transition Studies
• Core Research Topics in Stefan Thomas Hopmann’s Scholarship
• Section I: State-regulated Curriculum Work: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
• Section II: Curriculum Coordination Across Social and Cultural Contexts
• Curriculum Constitutional Mindsets
• Stefan Hopmann’s Collected Work and Curriculum Studies Today
• References
• Section I: State-regulated Curriculum Work: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
• Current Structures of Curriculum Making in the Federal Republic of Germany and their Impact on Content (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• References
• Retracing Curriculum History: The Multiple Realities of Curriculum Making (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• I. Compartmentalization
• II. Licensing
• III. Segmentation
• IV. Impacts
• References
• The Monitorial Movement and the Rise of Curriculum Administration: A Comparative View (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• The Origins of the Monitorial Movement
• A Sweeping Success
• Low cost
• Reduced teacher training
• Standardization
• Control
• Individualization of school attendance
• Rigid discipline
• Versatility
• Non-denominational character
• Mutual Instruction and the Rise of Curriculum Administration in Denmark, Schleswig, and Holstein
• Stories of Success and Failure: Or, Why There Was No Monitorial System in Prussia
• Conclusion
• References
• How do Curricula Work? Models, Strategies, and Contradictions (Jörg Biehl, Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Frank Ohlhaver)
• Various Forms of Curriculum Work
• Leeway in Curriculum Mediation
• School Organization and Lesson Planning
• References
• The Curriculum as a Standard of Public Education (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• A Short History of the Curriculum Work
• Curriculum Work as a Division of Discourse
• Basic Forms of Curriculum Work
• The philanthropic model
• The license model
• The examen-artium model
• The assessment model
• The license model
• The philanthropic model
• The examen-artium and the assessment model
• References
• On the Evaluation of Curriculum Reforms (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• Evaluation
• Institutionalization
• The Evaluation of Institutions and the Institutionalizing of Evaluation
• Traditions of Process Control
• Traditions of Product Control
• Changing Patterns of Evaluation
• References
• Section II: Curriculum Coordination Across Social and Cultural Contexts
• About Impostors and Other Educators (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• References
• Leeways in Curriculum Work: Basic Features of a Theory of Curriculum Planning (Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Rudolf Künzli)
• Curriculum Work and its Theory
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• References
• The School Subject as an Action Framework—Traditions and Perspectives of Research (Stefan Hopmann & Kurt Riquarts)
• On the Institutionalization History of the Subjects and Subject Didactics
• On the Relationship of Subject Didactics to the Curriculum and Teacher Training
• The Structure of the Didactic Sciences
• An Opportunity for the Future?
• References
• Restrained Teaching: The Common Core of Didaktik (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• Common Roots
• Order
• Sequence
• Choice
• Common Places
• Bildung
• Matter & meaning
• Autonomy
• Common Challenges
• Order
• Sequence
• Choice
• Comparing Didaktik
• References
• Diversity United. The Scandinavian Tradition of Lesson Planning (Jorunn H. Midtsundstad & Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• Introduction
• The Claimed Shift from Teaching to Learning
• Four Common Roots
• Pietism
• Philanthropism
• Grundtvigianism
• Reform pedagogy
• Three Common Notions
• Students: diverse, but equal
• Teachers: Profession, but no shared professionalism
• Content: Common, but different
• Lesson Planning
• Timeline
• Relation model (relasjonsdidaktikk)
• One Common Risk
• New Research and a Scandinavian Suggestion
• Diversity United—a Common Challenge
• References
• “Didaktik Meets Curriculum” Revisited: Historical Encounters, Systematic Experience, and Empirical Limits (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• Encounters
• Experiences
• Limits/Borders
• References
• School Leadership as Gap Management: Curriculum Traditions, Changing Evaluation Parameters, and School Leadership Pathways (Mariella Knapp & Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• Introduction
• The German Tradition of Didaktik
• Changing Times
• School Leadership as Gap Management
• School Leaders as a Target for Educational Policies
• The Implementation of Educational Standards and National Testing in Austria
• Mixed Messages: School Leaders Re-framing the Feedback from National Testing: Results from the Interview Study
• Gap Management in Testing Times
• References
• Section III: Curriculum Constitutional Mindsets
• Didaktik and/or Curriculum: Basic Problems of Comparative Didaktik (Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Kurt Riquarts)
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• References
• Didaktik Meets Curriculum: Toward a New Agenda (Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Bjørg Brandtzæg Gundem)
• Didaktikk, Didaktik, Didactique, Didactics, or What are we Talking About?
• In Search of Difference
• Toward a New Research Agenda
• References
• Mind the Gap: Dewey on Educational Bridge-building (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• References
• No Child, No School, No State Left Behind: Schooling in the Age of Accountability (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• The Age of Accountability
• Accountability
• Managing Transition
• Constitutional Mindsets
• The Multiple Realities of Accountability
• No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
• No School Left Behind
• No State Left Behind
• Comparative Accountability
• PISA in Transition
• References
• No Exceptions for Hottentots! Methods of Comparative Educational Science for Special Education Research (Stefan Thomas Hopmann)
• Introduction
• A Brief History of Comparative Special Education
• From Placement to Measurement
• The Measurement of Education
• Special Education Measurements
• References
• The “Equity Paradox” (Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Sonja Bauer-Hofmann)
• Inequality
• School Structures
• Student Performances
• Boundaries
• References

Wieland Wermke & Kirsten Sivesind (eds.)

Curriculum Dynamics within and across Contexts

Collected Works of Stefan Thomas Hopmann

Berlin · Bruxelles · Chennai · Lausanne · New York · Oxford

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2025027013

This publication is financed by The Swedish Research Council (VR) (Grant no VR 2020-03652).

ISSN 0934-0858

ISBN 978-3-631-92376-4 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-631-92377-1 (E-PDF)

ISBN 978-3-631-92378-8 (E-PUB)

DOI 10.3726/b22138

Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

© Wieland Wermke & Kirsten Sivesind, 2025

Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin (Germany)

info@peterlang.com

This publication has been peer reviewed.

www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents

List of Sources

Preface

Tracing Curriculum Dynamics within and across Contexts. An Introduction to Stefan Thomas Hopmann’s work

Kirsten Sivesind & Wieland Wermke

Section I: State-regulated Curriculum Work: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Current Structures of Curriculum Making in the Federal Republic of Germany and their Impact on Content

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

Retracing Curriculum History: The Multiple Realities of Curriculum Making

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

The Monitorial Movement and the Rise of Curriculum Administration: A Comparative View

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

How do Curricula Work? Models, Strategies, and Contradictions

Jörg Biehl, Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Frank Ohlhaver

The Curriculum as a Standard of Public Education

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

On the Evaluation of Curriculum Reforms

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

Section II: Curriculum Coordination Across Social and Cultural Contexts

About Impostors and Other Educators

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

Leeways in Curriculum Work: Basic Features of a Theory of Curriculum Planning

Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Rudolf Künzli

The School Subject as an Action Framework—Traditions and Perspectives of Research

Stefan Hopmann & Kurt Riquarts

Restrained Teaching: The Common Core of Didaktik

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

Diversity United. The Scandinavian Tradition of Lesson Planning

Jorunn H. Midtsundstad & Stefan Thomas Hopmann

“Didaktik Meets Curriculum” Revisited: Historical Encounters, Systematic Experience, and Empirical Limits

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

School Leadership as Gap Management: Curriculum Traditions, Changing Evaluation Parameters, and School Leadership Pathways

Mariella Knapp & Stefan Thomas Hopmann

Section III: Curriculum Constitutional Mindsets

Didaktik and/or Curriculum: Basic Problems of Comparative Didaktik

Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Kurt Riquarts

Didaktik Meets Curriculum: Toward a New Agenda

Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Bjørg Brandtzæg Gundem

Mind the Gap: Dewey on Educational Bridge-building

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

No Child, No School, No State Left Behind: Schooling in the Age of Accountability

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

No Exceptions for Hottentots! Methods of Comparative Educational Science for Special Education Research

Stefan Thomas Hopmann

The “Equity Paradox”

Stefan Thomas Hopmann & Sonja Bauer-Hofmann

Preface

Collecting a scholarly life into a book volume is an interesting but challenging endeavor. Before the reader starts his/her reading, we want to explain why we processed the project at hand, which resulted in a collection of works from the academic production of Professor Dr. Stefan Thomas Hopmann, Vienna University.

Wieland Wermke is a professor of special education at Stockholm University. Kirsten Sivesind is a professor of education at the University of Oslo. We met Hopmann at different points in our careers. Kirsten served first as his research assistant in the last year of the research project, Didaktik meets Curriculum. Thereafter, she became a doctoral fellow and a researcher in three of Hopmann’s research projects, which he coordinated during 1997–2008. During these years, Kirsten archived both data-material and literature, published by Hopmann and colleagues, of which some texts have been reprinted or referenced in this volume. During the last 10 years, Kirsten has served as an associate editor in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, where Hopmann is the editor-in-chief. Wieland met Hopmann for the first time while organizing a conference on curriculum theory at Uppsala University in 2013. In this conference, Hopmann gave a keynote, which he, thereafter, developed into an article, included in the special issue that came out of this conference. Wieland was one of the co-editors of this special issue. Since then, Wieland has had scholarly exchanges with Hopmann up until today. As a native German speaker, he has also translated five of the 19 essays in this book from German to English.

We, editors of this collective work volume, meet in our interest in comparative education research with a particular focus on how curriculum develops within organizational structures in school systems and lays the foundation for professional practices of various types. For the research in their fields, we see a significant need for robust concepts and terminologies, as offered in Hopmann’s collected work. Hopmann’s efforts to develop conceptual frameworks for comparative and historical analyses support the understanding and explanation of the complex and contingent relations between international policy dynamics and nation-specific particularities in a globalizing world. These dynamics result in varying ways of organizing school systems and practices of those active in these: teachers, principals, special educators, school administrators at various levels, and politicians who work with educational problems.

This book volume would not have been possible without the support of many people and organizations. Many of the publishers of the original works have granted free permission to re-publish their work in this volume. Some publishers of his early works do not exist anymore, some of the more recent pieces have been published with a Creative Common 4.0 license. This license enables re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, if attribution is given to the creator and the first publishing source. All co-authors, if still alive, allowed us to re-publish the essays, and so did Stefan Thomas Hopmann, for which we are very thankful. The first footnote in each work presented here details the respective publishing conditions. Since this book volume is as whole also published with a Creative Common 4.0 license, all works presented in this volume can be distributed, remixed, adapted, and built upon in any medium or format, if attribution is given to the creator and the first publishing source.

Inken Beck, a doctoral student of special education at Stockholm University, supported us with the layout of the book and controlling, formatting, and standardizing the references of each work. Last but not least, the publication of this volume as Open Access Publication under Creative Common License has happened in the research project “From Salamanca to PISA. The professionalization of Special Educators since 1990 from a comparative perspective” (VR 2020-03652), led by Wieland Wermke and funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Tracing Curriculum Dynamics within and across Contexts. An Introduction to Stefan Thomas Hopmann’s work

Kirsten Sivesind & Wieland Wermke

In the context of globalization and international policy dynamics, where international organizations and assessments are increasingly influencing the pace and direction of educational reform, it is imperative to examine how schooling is evolving as a political and practical endeavor, and how research is engaging with current changes. Curriculum research addresses issues central to understanding the dynamics of both continuity and change, including the rapid changes and threats to democracies in contemporary societies.

Stefan Thomas Hopmann’s scholarship represents one of the most thorough and insightful efforts to examine curricular processes across historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, he stands out as a key scholar in this field of research. Hopmann’s research spans a wide range of research areas and perspectives, including cross-disciplinary reasoning and topical analysis, integrating insights from classical theories to late-modern approaches. As such, this book of Hopmann’s collected works provides both broad perspectives, theoretical explorations, and concrete knowledge, useful to researchers and students, and those working practically with curriculum and didactics.

Throughout his long research career, Hopmann has explored the various drivers of curriculum change and has highlighted why certain research approaches are too simplistic to fully understand the complexity of how politics interact with programmatic and practical contexts. By advancing theories of how curriculum processes unfold, Hopmann challenges academics and various stakeholders to rethink their underlying views and beliefs about public schooling. His theories and conceptual approaches, which imply an underlying critique of conventional perceptions, are undoubtedly of considerable value. For a broad set of purposes, Hopmann has greatly contributed to uncovering the interplay between various dimensions of curriculum work. By focusing on the relational aspects within and across national and international contexts, Hopmann offers a deep understanding of curriculum dynamics and their complexities. However, so far, Hopmann’s works, published in various languages, have not been presented in a coherent collection of writings in English.

This edited volume aims to put the pieces together to promote Hopmann’s scholarly work and increase his recognition within the international community of academics and professionals. To this end, we have chosen the most significant essays in Hopmann’s scholarship. This means that this collection contains those essays that have significantly contributed new ideas and concepts to the field of international and comparative curriculum studies. The volume at hand, consequently, is supposed to cover Hopmann’s various conceptual contributions. His list of publications is, however, longer than the 19 chosen pieces, and that also comprises work presenting similar ideas in varying languages (such as English, German, or the Scandinavian languages). Our main criterion of choice has been the ambition to present those texts, which were the most prominent (often printed in English publication channels) or which presented new concepts for the first time.

Some of the writings in this collection were translated from German to English and are therefore available for an English-speaking audience for the first time. We have also edited the texts’ layouts and references to ensure coherence and consistency throughout the volume; typos and obvious language mistakes have been removed. Moreover, we have received the resubmission permits from Hopmann and the publishers and various co-authors of the original versions and made the works available as an open-access volume. The collection and publishing work have been made possible by project funding from the Swedish Research Council for the project “From Salamanca to PISA. The Professionalization of Special Educators Since 1990 From a Comparative Perspective” (VR 2020-03652).

In an endeavor to make Hopmann’s publications accessible in a coherent form, we encourage readers, including researchers, students, experts, and others, to rethink both historical and contemporary perspectives on public education and revisit scholarly discourses on how public schooling relates to the larger society, which is one of the core themes in Hopmann’s work. We hope that the book will motivate people to actively question underlying ideas and assumptions that are taken for granted and to engage with curriculum problems in both political and practical contexts. Based on our review of the articles available online and building on personal archives collected over many years, we have compiled a volume of key texts covering the core themes and approaches central to Hopmann’s research. We cannot, of course, cover every aspect and dimension of theoretical value, but have purposively chosen themes and perspectives that may contribute to advancing international and comparative research on schooling and curriculum. Finally, we hope to revitalize research topics and encourage researchers in the educational sciences to continue Stefan Thomas Hopmann’s work.