Weidmann, Laura; Fiechter, Ursula (2023). The Didactics of autonomy in multi-grade classrooms. In: The Fabrication of the Autonomous Learner. Ethnographies of Educational Practices in Switzerland, France and Germany (pp. 75-90). London: Routledge 10.4324/9781003379676

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To foster the individualization of teaching, many school authorities in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland, have reorganized classrooms into multigrade classes. In heterogeneous classrooms, so the assumption goes, the need to adapt teaching to the individual needs of diverse pupils is particularly salient. Multigrade classes, therefore, offer a unique insight into the strategies by which teachers adapt to the expectations of individualization. This chapter looks at the subjectivation practices of teachers tied to their concepts of autonomy and methods of didactical differentiation. Drawing from the observation of two multigrade classrooms and from interviews with teachers and pupils, we analyse how the two teachers differentiate their teaching in order to accommodate the different abilities of students. In both classrooms, the teachers use grade levels as a basic category of distinction. Further categorizations of students are shaped by the teachers’ subjective understanding of student autonomy. In one of the presented cases, autonomy is seen as a method, hence the teacher focusses her support on a methodical progression path to enable pupils to work on their own. In the other case, the teacher understands autonomy as a development of self-awareness and self-positioning in relation to others. To this end, she sees social interactions as a main vehicle and fosters them in abundant classroom conversations and co-creative tasks on each learning topic. These informal, subjective, and general ascriptions of pupil autonomy deserve more attention in empirical classroom research since they serve teachers as performance indicators and shape their ways of supporting and evaluating individual pupils.

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