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DIDACTIC TEACHING METHOD
Didactic methods of teaching is where teacher focus on imparting lessons to students.Different methods can be used by teachers which caters to the need of the students and their personal preferences. Students are instructed directly through planned lessons and lecture method.
Didactic teaching method sets specific learning objective which is delivered to the students. Teachers are assigned to make lesson plans and design coursework for students to acheive objectives.
In this method there is periodic evaluation to gauge the understanding and progress toward achiveing their learning objectives.
This method encourages students to take notes from the lectures delivered by the teachers and asking questions to clarify doubts.
Dadactic method is Teacher centic and it emphasis on how to educate students.Teachers who uses didactic teaching approach focus more on the content of the curriculam. Didactic method is knowledge oriented and focus on directly transferring their knowledge to their students.
Didactic pedagogy and the Polish interwar classroom in Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke (1937)
I recalled a scene from this Polish novel, considered a masterpiece of 20th century literature, that offers an analytical perspective on didactic pedagogy through literary humor and surrealism.
The narrator turns 30, but instead of entering maturity he is unceremoniously transformed into his teenaged self and sent back to a circa 1920 classroom where he relives the infantilizing experience of being a student in a didactic classroom. (This has had lingering effects on his personal identity -- his inability to reach independent adulthood). For example, the teacher lectures:
“You ignorant dunderheads, get this firmly fixed in your heads and repeat after me: Juliusz Słowacki was a great poet, a great poet, we love Juliusz Słowacki, and his poems delight us because he was a great poet….” (https://books.openedition.org/ceup/1118?lang=en, l. 28)
This line obviously captures the discursive and intersubjective aspects of the didactic classroom. Here, the teacher tries to inculcate the acceptable approach to a 19th-c Polish Romantic Poet. The teacher has the superior knowledge, and the students are empty vessels expected merely to repeat received truths: “there’s nothing like school for inculcating a love of art. Which of us would have been capable of admiring the great geniuses if the knowledge that they were great geniuses had not been hammered into our heads at school?” (https://books.openedition.org/ceup/1118?lang=en ,l. 48)
As in Winston Churchill’s memoir in which the young Churchill questions the utility and logic of saying “O, table” when practicing Latin declensions, a schoolchild in Gombrowicz’s novel upends the expected proprietary dimensions of didactic pedgagy.
These kinds of questions are not a proper discursive expectation in this setting:
“But if he [Slowacki] has no effect on me whatever, if he simply doesn’t interest me, if I can’t read two verses of his without falling asleep... ?? (https://books.openedition.org/ceup/1118?lang=en, l.30)
Rather, the kind of question the student poses here (and the one young Churchill posed in his memoir), show an independent-minded students enacting agency in the classroom – an acceptable student position in Reflexive or Transformative pedagogy.
Finally, the scene from the Polish novel I have selected also demonstrates an important point about what our lecturer has called “the moral economy” of pedagogy. The unquestioning, worshipful attitude toward 19th-century Polish poets is an important element in building a national identity in interwar Poland -- a nation that was swallowed up by neighboring empires only to regain its independence in 1918. So, of course, schoolchildren needed to learn to admire “great” Polish poetry from the previous century.
The idea of Polish poetry playing a central role in creating a so-called “imagined community” continues to be an important theme in Polish culture, see this online lecture by Dr. Stanley Bill as an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5ilis7EHd0
And a related point about the didactic classroom as a site of what could be called “ancestor worship” also appeared in our reading by Chinese American memoirist Yan Pho Lee.
https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-2/supporting-material/yan-pho-lees-school-days
Lee’s memoir hints at the long-term effects of this pedagogy even after schoolchildren have reached adulthood – a theme not unlike what we saw in Gombrowicz’s novel.
Didactic model is also very much centered in rules and hierarchy. It refers to some paternalistic view of the school or the academia or the teacher being the one-s to have the valuable knowledge in their hands and that would be transmiting good information. It questions for me the reproduction of elites or privileged old pedagogy (thinking here of Plato's academia for very fiew young males...) that most society tend to question today but that is still recognized as the norm. Questionning our pedagogy model is questioning our society and its values (philosophy is not far ...).
I agree with @Sylvia Martin in this observation. I wrote a blog post on the paternalistic didactic classroom pedagogy as it was humorously depicted in a Polish interwar novel. In that novel, it was an all-male class as well!