(1) Prolegomena

Guidelines, not instruction

This curriculum is a model and guideline, a structure of ideas, and a demand on teachers, students, and society. However, it is not a guide, instruction, or even a collection of teaching materials for individual teachers: It …

• guides students on their educational path,
• promotes teachers in their professional activities,
• informs society and the public about the educational challenges for today’s future.

An overarching paradigm for this is outcome and development orientation.

Teaching and learning
Teaching learning and learning to teach – this is the goal, mission, and message of being a teacher and their teaching and educational activities as an independent profession in the pedagogical fields of action at the diverse learning sites of professional reality in dealing with children and youths up to the fourth grade. Because the human being as a person shapes; methods are always only crutches of ideas. The objective is oriented towards the creation, realisation, and further development of the best possible design of educational and instructional formative action in the pedagogical challenges of Austria and its people for the present and the future.

Professionalism and pedagogy

Professional and pedagogical qualification secure their intrinsic value within pedagogical education through their constitutive interrelation. Professional quality remains the priority, whereby the role of the subject must be rethought both in the pedagogical field as well as in an curricular and age-appropriate manner. Because the coordinates of knowledge have changed because of the transformation of media, politics. and society.
Educator education rests on ..

• professional knowledge and skills,
• the ability to impart this knowledge and skill and to facilitate learning under optimal conditions,
• the ability and willingness to perform educational tasks on the basis of societal (ethical, cultural, social) values,
• a career entry phase with gradual increase in teaching autonomy,
• the willingness to engage in lifelong learning and, associated with this, the ability to adapt to new tasks in the educational profession.

Lifelong learning

The classical four-pillar model – scientific discipline, subject didactics, pedagogy, school practice – must be indispensably supplemented by the continuity aspect of the lifelong educational mission for proving oneself in learning educational organisations. The quality of pedagogical education is determined by the forms of support for competence development in the variety of pedagogical fields of activity and areas of competence (cf Point 4: Reference framework for fields of activity) in the forms of daily work through teaching and educating, forming, diagnosing, testing and evaluating, guiding, and counselling.

Research-led

Research, teaching, and the professional field are in a lively interplay with each other. The research-based reflexive approach to one’s own actions is seen as a fundamental basic qualification for future educators. At the same time, research questions arise in the development of the education system; these are to be answered in a practical way. In addition, it is important to build up scientific expertise for essential fields of action according to the standards of the international research community and to cover central areas of educational research. In the research efforts, the focus is on establishing the trust of the researched as affected persons. Theory is spelled out precisely on the case: Learning and educational processes of children and young people are simulated, analysed, guided, assessed, and evaluated in order to better understand learning and to enable teaching in it.