“Wunderwuzzis” needed – new curricula for teachers impractical and impossible

The new curricula for all subjects at primary, secondary and AHS lower level have been in development since 2018 and should apply from 2023/24. Technically, they are ordinances issued by the concerned Minister of Education. Above all, the compulsory schoolers miss the practical relevance: “At least ten specialists from the field are said to have worked on the content of each subject. Obviously, this expertise was not sufficiently taken into account when creating the curriculum, which we not only deeply regret, but will also have a negative impact on practicality in the classroom.”

Interdisciplinary skills communicating “almost impossible”
In all curricula a distinction is made between technical, interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary competences. According to the union, the technical skills are “illegally written” and are in danger of becoming a “best kept secret”. In contrast, teaching interdisciplinary skills such as motivation, self-awareness and self-confidence or social and learning method skills seems “almost impossible” in the currently large classrooms with children of different nationalities or with different learning needs.

13 cross-curricular subjects in the new curriculum
The teachers also found the implementation of 13 interdisciplinary topics in the classroom “difficult to implement”. These range from entrepreneurship education to IT and intercultural education, reflective gender education and equality or sex education to traffic education and environmental education for sustainable development.

In general, the representatives of compulsory school teachers ask themselves the question of the practical relevance of some formulations in the curriculum: There it says about the general didactic principles: “Teachers see it as their task to observe and support students individually and avoid stereotypes and commitments Teachers know and use appropriate pedagogical diagnostic tools to identify students’ learning needs and support their learning accordingly They promote individual learning through different and varied learning environments and use appropriate learning materials They give individual, learning-promoting feedback and enable the students to consciously perceive their increase in competence.”

Teachers required: ‘125,000 miracle workers needed’
“And that in a class with 25 to 29 students!” write the union members. The practitioners involved in the curriculum may have lost practical relevance here, they suspect – “or it is generally believed that there are about 125,000 ‘Wunderwuzzis’ working in Austrian schools”.

The teachers’ union AHS argues in the same way: “The structure according to subject-specific, interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary competences, the amount of text and the large number of interdisciplinary subjects make the curriculum difficult to read. Many of the desired goals seem difficult to achieve or impractical to us.” They reject the planned entry into force with the school year: in this short time no textbooks could be approved or overtime avoided.