ICL 7659: Civics Chapter Review

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Journal of Social Science Education Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2014 DOI 10.2390/jsse‐v14‐i1‐1273

Dr. Benita Blessing is an Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna, Department of Education, Institut für Bildungswissenschaft, Sensengasse 3a Room O5.13, A‐1090 Wien, Austria Email: [email protected] May Jehle, MA, is a PhD candidate and holds a dissertation

fellowship in the Department of Education in the Unit of Empirical Research and Theory at the University of Vienna, Institut für Bildungswissenschaft Room O5.12, Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Wien, Austria Email: [email protected]

May Jehle, Benita Blessing

Using Classroom Recordings in Educational History Research. An East German Civics Lesson Students learned in civics lessons in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) that their socialist society uniquely guaranteed all individuals the right to work, and that, as good socialists, they had the duty to take on socially meaningful work. Using the example of a video recording of an East German civics lesson and its transcription, this article demonstrates how to use audio‐visual sources in historical scholarship on educational research. In this manner, we offer a new source in the evaluation of the East German state’s attempt to socialize young East Germans to value work as part of their socialist responsibility to the nation. Im Staatsbürgerkundeunterricht der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR) sollte den Schüler_innen vermittelt werden, dass nur in einer sozialistischen Gesellschaft das Recht auf Arbeit gesichert ist und dass damit auch die Pflicht eines sozialistischen Staatsbürgers zu gesellschaftlich nützlicher Tätigkeit verbunden ist. Am Beispiel einer Videoaufzeichnung einer Unterrichtstunde zu dieser Thematik und ausgewählten Transkriptauszügen diskutiert der Artikel, wie audiovisuelle Quellen in der historischen Unterrichtsforschung genutzt werden können. Diskutiert werden damit auch die Möglichkeiten der Erschließung einer neuen Quelle zur Erforschung des Versuchs staatlich organisierter Erziehung, die den Schüler_innen die Bedeutung von Arbeit als eine sozialistische Errungenschaft und als Verpflichtung jedes sozialistischen Staatsbürgers zugleich vermitteln sollte. Keywords GDR, East Germany, Cold War, civics lessons, employment, unemployment, right to work, national duty, socialism, videorecordings, educational research, methodology, Oral History, students, teachers Consequences of Unemployment in the Capitalist West Male student: They start up with pot, or, um, become criminals, or (...) Another male student: Well, that then they probably go rob banks, to get money. Teacher: Umm‐hmm. Student: Juvenile delinquency goes up. Teacher: Yes. Do you know where juvenile delinquency is highest? Another student: In the USA. Teacher: In New York.

1 Introduction The claim of full employment in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) has long been recognized as a "matter of politics, not of economics" (Sperlich 2006, 127). Without a doubt, the GDR's constitutional guarantee of employment did not follow market principles and contributed to a distorted labor market in the GDR and ensuing persistent unemployment in that region after German unification in

1990. Yet, a history of work in the GDR that focuses only on economic analyses of "disguised unemployment" and "overmanning" (Nativel 2004, 2) neglects the social and cultural aspects of how East Germans understood their role in a policy of full employment. In this article we use a video recording of a secondary school civics lesson to demonstrate how East German students and their teachers constructed a shared paradigm of individual and collective responsibility to work for and as part of their socialist state. The lesson we analyse is a video recording that is part

of a larger collection of recordings of civics lessons in the GDR from the archive of the Academy of Educational Sciences of the GDR (Akademie der Pädagogischen Wissenschaften, hereafter APW), located in then‐East Berlin. These recordings, primarily made for the research school of the department of pedagogy that was housed in the APW from 1978‐1986, were used in research projects regarding the training and continuing education of teachers. Along with similar recordings from the GDR's Humboldt University (1970‐1989) and other educational colleges from these periods, they fell into obscurity after German unification. A key problem was the loss of equipment made to play these recordings, as well as unfavourable storage conditions of the films that threatened to damage them beyond repair. A series of research projects (see http://www.schulunterricht‐ ddr.de/) allowed for the digitalization of the recordings, making them available for scholars in accordance with data privacy laws in an online databank (http://www.fachportal‐paedagogik.de/ forschungsdaten bildung/studie.php?studien_id=4). Because these recordings present a relatively new

historical source, discussions about methodological considerations for their use in educational research are at an early phase (Schluß, Jehle 2013). However, contemporary documents, including recorded evaluations of discussions in the APW's research school

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about the lessons, informational films for educators based on audiovisual excerpts of exemplary instruction, and Oral History interviews with the director of the video we present here and the teacher featured in it have helped provide insight into the recordings' uses and evolution.1 We have transcribed the video recording in order to

enhance our ability to document the audio and visual aspects of this lesson, rather than merely summarizing key themes in it. After a brief overview of basic questions regarding transcription as a research aid, including its explanatory possibilities and limits, we describe how we use the transcript in our analysis. This discussion then underlines the need to bring in other sources such as contemporary textbooks and teaching aids in order to identify the approximate date of this recording, as well as to facilitate viable interpretations of the pedagogical aims of this lesson and the degree to which it can be regarded as typical of civics lessons in the GDR.

2 Issues regarding documentation and transcription The documentation of a historical moment that is

based primarily on the transcription of a video recording immediately faces the problem of the creation of the transcript itself, a phenomenon that Dinkelaker and Herrle identify as the "overcomplexity of videographic data" (Dinkelaker, Herrle 2009, 41).2 Transcription, given the impossibility of an exact transmission of content from one medium to another, cannot claim to provide a textual duplicate of a recording (Reichertz, Englert 2011, 21‐22). Nor is the transcript intended to replace the video; underpinning our analysis is the recognition of the "tape as the final authority" (Jordan, Henderson 1995, 45). We have therefore selected a transcription method that makes the best use of a recording's ability to show discretely the sequence and simultaneity of communication and interactions of the filmed subjects (Erickson 1992, 219; Jordan, Henderson 1995, 48; Dinkelaker, Herrle 2009, 44‐51). The transcription excerpts here show the discussions that take place during the lesson alongside the accompanying actions that are observable and/or audible. A further column includes details about the cameras'

settings. This information provides the basis for the different perspectives that contribute to how a given scene is constructed and perceived. Moreover, an analysis of camera angles and shots allow for the "action that is shown" to be distinguished from "action of showing" and to question the degree to which the lesson takes on performative dimensions, turning it into a staged production during the recording.3 Since the data collection in the form of a transcription is always intertwined with the analysis of the recording being transcribed, there can never be a final version of it; it is always a working transcript that can and must be edited and reworked alongside and throughout the process of analysis.

3 Civics Lessons about the right and duty to work

3.1 Background information about the recording The theme of "The Right and Duty to Work" (Video File:

"Das Recht und die Pflicht zur Arbeit") discussed in this recording was included in the civics curriculum for the eighth grade under the topic "The Rights and Duties of the Socialist Citizen". The students in this class are between thirteen and fourteen years of age; there are approximately twenty‐five to thirty students in the class. Based on the information available to us through the videorecording and other documents, it is not possible to ascertain the gender ratio. However, it is likely that, given demographic statistics and the students who are visible on‐screen and, and to a lesser degree, student voices off‐screen, that there are about the same number of girls and boy in this class. In a June 2012 interview, the teacher of this lesson

remembered that this instructional unit generally bored students, since they were not interested in regulations, laws or the role of the state in society. The exact date of this lesson is unknown; however, in this recording, the teacher reads newspaper articles from the 17th and 20th of February 1982 to the students, narrowing the possible timeframe somewhat, since it is a logical assumption that she was using current materials. Other indicators point to the likelihood that this lesson took place during the testing stage of the new curriculum that was implemented in 1983; during the aforementioned interview, the teacher also vividly remembered this period of testing out these lesson plans and the emphasis on "problem‐based instruction" (problemhafte Unterrichtsgestaltung) that was intended to facilitate the Marxist‐Leninist‐oriented dialectal approach to teaching and learning.4 The lesson plans themselves and the accompanying new teaching aids increase the probability that the teacher based her lesson on the new curriculum, including the way in which the lesson reflects the model of problem‐based instruction.

3.2 Transcript excerpts We have selected the first fifteen minutes of the

recorded lesson as illustrative of a GDR civics lesson concerned with the question of work in a socialist society. The analysis of this section is presented here in two parts, with parts of the transcribed lesson presented in text. The full transcript of these fifteen minutes can be found at the end of the article in the original German and translated into English. We make occasional reference to the entire hour, summarizing important aspects not included in the part of the transcript presented here. A few words regarding the constellation of the

classroom and cameras are in order: Students who can be seen on‐camera are identified by gender and seat number, for example, S(tudent)f(emale)(seat number)9, Sf9. Information about the student that is not available is indicated by a question mark (?). Three cameras were used to record the lesson. One camera stands to the front and left of the room and recorded a frontal view of

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the class, whereby the middle and right rows of benches can be seen. The left row of benches cannot be seen. This camera angle is noted as "class" in the transcript. A second camera is positioned to the rear of the classroom on the right side, and shows the chalkboard and part of the two right rear rows of benches. This angle is noted as "chalkboard". The third camera is focused on one female student (Sf9); other students (Sm8, Sm12, Sm13, S?17) can also be seen. This angle is noted as "partial".

Camera perspectives (from top down): ‘class’,

‘chalkboard’, ‘partial’

Based on this information, the seating chart (above)

can be reconstructed:

Only the benches that are visible in the recording are

noted in the seating chart. Those students who are called on by name are given aliases to protect anonymity. Since only parts of S?3, S?16 and S?17 can be seen, their gender remains unknown. Another problem is presented with students who have the same names. Thus, in addition to "Carsten" (Sm2), there is another student out of the camera's range named "Carsten". There are also two students named "Michael"; one is visible in the recording (Sm18) while the other is not. One student, Sm13, is sometimes identified as "Martin" and at other times as "Marten". It is probable that there is another male student in the class named Marten – which would explain the confusion of names – who sits in the left section of the class, off‐camera. In the approximate first ten minutes of the sequence,

the teacher writes down students' terms that address the meaning of work for the individual. The recording starts after the beginning of the class – the teacher had written the word "work" on the chalkboard and then asks what students associate with the word. It is possible that the terms "rights and duties" had been mentioned before the beginning of the recording, which the teacher writes on the chalkboard at the beginning of the recording. Based on the students' answers ("livelihood is […] guaranteed", "you earn your living", "the right to work", "increase in the standard of living", "good apartment", "wages", "societal conditions"), the teacher writes "guarantees livelihood", "subsistence", "increase" and "wage" on the board. After the teacher once again encouraged the students to be more "concrete", she

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reminds them of the assignment. At this point, 2:31 minutes have elapsed, and at this point the first transcript excerpt begins (See Transcript Excerpt 1 in the appendix). The following stills show the development of what

appears on the chalkboard:

At this point, the teacher transitions from writing

students' suggestions on the board to a discussion of the meaning of work for individuals (see Transcript Excerpt 2 in the appendix).

4 Beyond the GDR: A lesson about unemployment After the class discusses the meaning of work for

people during the first quarter‐hour, the lesson turns to the theme of "unemployment". The teacher introduces the topic by opening up the chalkboard so that the terms from the first ten minutes are visible. She then asks students for answers to the question "And now think for a second about what it would mean for someone who doesn't have any work?" As students read the terms from the chalkboard out loud, she responds by drawing a line through the benefits that someone without employment would not be able to enjoy. At the end, it is clear that all aspects of guaranteed employment would fall away.

The teacher announces that the class should think of

examples to go with the phrases on the board, but first asks the students about their ideal jobs, which she comments on favourably. In response to the answers to her question as to why students were so certain that they would be able to practice their chosen professions, which could be summarized as society guaranteeing them employment, one student protested that individual ability played a role. The teacher decided to let those comments stand and moved on to the next part of the lesson, reading two newspaper articles from "Neues Deutschland", the central organ of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), the GDR's official political party. Both reports dramatically portrayed the situation of unemployed youth in West Berlin and London as a desperate one with no hope of a solution. The teacher then provided data about unemployment

in the West (see the student notes below), which juxtaposed 28.5 million unemployed in capitalist countries with the fully employed population of the GDR (17 million), although the source of these statistics or their context is unclear. The teacher concluded that, in the face of these numbers, "No one here, more than that even, would have work, not a single person." She then went on to state that, in the "FRG" (an abbreviation for the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, that

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the West did not use during the Cold War in order to distance itself from the common usage of "GDR”), it was only possible to receive unemployment benefits after twelve months of employment, a condition that no one could meet upon completing secondary school if immediate employment could not be found. Then her next question: "So, what happens if you don't have any guarantee of support, if you get nothing, what's the final consequence of that?" The discussion then took place as follows (see German

version in appendix):

Sm?: They start up with pot, or, um, become

criminals, or (...) Tf: (Umm‐hmm.) That's what you all wanted to say,

right, what did you want to say, Marten? Sm13: Well, that then they probably go rob banks, to

get money. Tf: Umm‐hmm. S?: Juvenile delinquency goes up. Tf: Yes. Do you know where juvenile delinquency is

highest? S?: In the USA. Tf: In New York. Yes, youth, um, crimes committed by

young people, is highest of all. There are whole city districts, where foreigners, for example, who go to New York, where, at the airport, before anything else, where they are given a pamphlet where it says that you shouldn't take this or that subway line, we're warning you that you shouldn't go to this or that area, and at night, after such‐and‐such a time, don't you dare go out on the street, no matter what. Because youth gangs, of course, they will try to earn a living somehow. So criminality is the highest in New York, in the entire world. S?: Yeah I saw this news report once, they, they took,

so they arrested this boy, he was fourteen years old, had a, he had a knife, and then he, well four, he pushed his way into a hotel, in an elevator, and he threatened four people, umm, that they give him their jewellery and cash. Tf: And that's not unusual, right. It's just normal. So

where are young people s'posed to earn a living? It doesn't give them a single chance.

The students repeat the drastic formulations in their

answers that the newspaper articles employ about the hopelessness of young people's situation in the West, naming drug use as the first likely crime that those western youth would likely turn to as an escape. The students' claims are not put into any kind of context by the teacher, who affirms their validity by placing them into one single narrative about "criminality" in New York. Even the news report that one student mentions is not seen as unique, but rather as an unassailable generalization with the teacher's remark that "And that's

not unusual, right." The message of this lesson, that capitalism robs people "of the right to work, the most important human right that they have," is made clear by the entry that the teacher directs students to write in their notebooks: "Work is the basis for human life. Work is the source of all wealth. It is the basic condition for life... it created people. Unemployment: 28.5 million in capitalist industrial states, of which 14 million is young people. Capitalism denies humans the right to work." In the last ten minutes of the class, the teacher turns to

the possibility of "the absolute enforcement (Durchsetzung) of the right to work" by means of a socialist revolution, which would bring about the elimination of private ownership of the means of production. She then instructs a student to read a section out loud from the GDR's constitution, which guarantees all citizens of the GDR the right to work and fair wages.1 The students then are directed to read a paragraph of the constitution on their own and identify topics that had not yet been discussed in class. The objective here is to guide the students to the issue of socialist citizens' duty to work, a point that Sm13 starts to address. After acknowledging his point, she then begins to wrap up the lesson and gives the students their homework assignment: "Why is work also a duty?", which they are to talk about with their parents and friends at home and bring notes about the answers to the next class. The teacher instructs the students to stand – the official signal for the end of the class – and the recording stops as well.

5 Comments

5.1 Normative or typical? Before turning our attention to the first fifteen minutes

of the lesson, it is perhaps helpful to understand how this teacher's approach to the subject fit into larger discussions by the APW about best teaching practices. This same teacher had already been the subject of another video recording about a similar theme with a different class; the resulting film, a selection of highlights of that hour, became part of the APW's informational films for educators (Video File: "Forschungsgegenstand Unterricht"). In the introduction to the film, a commentator presents it as part of a research project that identified successful examples of effective use of problem‐based instruction that encouraged students in civics classes to engage actively with the material. After an excerpt from the teacher's class is shown, the commentator observes that the teacher had again demonstrated the successful use of the appropriate pedagogical concept throughout the class – suggesting that the teacher's lessons were a trusted source for

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modelling good teaching that could be used in instructional training. Clearly, not all civics lessons would have included every element shown in this video; more important is its normative aspect. That is, the APW intended for viewers to regard this as representative of an ideal civics lesson.

5.2 Role of the teacher in problem‐based instruction In the first transcript excerpt, in which the teacher asks

for students' ideas about the meaning of work, there is no actual presentation of a problem that – using the terminology of contemporary literature on the subject – contains a "contradiction" that would push the students to solve the problem. It seems more important to the teacher that the lesson be connected to the students' lives, an approach that does reflects a tenet of problem‐ based instruction (Feige 1974, Fuhrmann 1986). The likelihood that the teacher was consciously working within a framework of problem‐based instruction is furthermore demonstrated by the teacher's later memory of students normally not being able to see a connection between the topic of the lesson and their own life experiences, so that she was careful to help students make this connection in class. The initial question of the teacher does not do this successfully; after all, "work" in the sense of employment was not yet part of students' life experiences. Since their answers had been too general, she brought in the issue of wages and how students imagined their future professional hopes and dreams. Their responses seem more typical of modest, bourgeois aspirations than socialist ones; indeed, the students' and teacher's delighted reaction to Sm2's response that he wanted a house and car point to the limited possibilities open to students for such high aspirations. It is interesting to note that, for the second time, the

students bring up relatively quickly the topic of the "right to work", even before the teacher is ready to discuss that point in the lesson. It seems that the students might have anticipated that this theme would continue to play an important role throughout the rest of the class. Having ignored for all intents and purposes the first response regarding this topic by writing a different concept on the board, the teacher now points to the board and the concepts "rights / duties" written there and summarizes the answers as part of "the material side" of work. By inserting herself into the discussion, she offers the students an example of how they might make associations with the term "recognition", so that she is able to tie the students' examples back into their own lives and experiences. The idea of a "collective" is dealt with fairly swiftly before the end of this phase of the class. Perhaps the teacher suspects that the students will not have much to say about this topic; it might also be the case that she is trying to get through the entire lesson and decides to move to the next stage of it. In any

case, it is clear that she has been successful in facilitating a high level of student participation in this part of class, as evidenced by the numerous responses that can be seen in the transcript.

5.3 Classroom interaction:

Limits and possibilities of analysis When the teacher asks (Transcript Excerpt 2) which

answer students like best regarding the question of what work means for the individual, the difficulty of using recordings of a class to document what actually happened in the classroom becomes clear. Sm13, for example, is addressed as "Martin", but then later as "Marten", making it almost impossible to reconstruct who said what. Sm7 and S?3 respond to "Marten's" answer, but given the content of their responses, they do not mean Sm13. Who, then, is Sm13? He might be "Martin", or "Marten"; his visible reactions to parts of the discussion offer evidence for either possibility. Because we sometimes only hear, and do not see, the teacher talking to "Martin" and/or "Marten", we do not have enough evidence to know with certainty which students are actively participating in class. This confusion is important in recognizing the limits of

our ability to understand the interactions in the classroom. It is impossible to know whether student participation is evenly spread throughout the class, or if there are students who passively listen to the lesson. If one person dominates the discussion, then it is possible that some students see no connection between the topic at hand and their lives, or else are not interested in helping construct an atmosphere where all members of this particular collective have the right and duty to learn the lesson presented to them as part of their education to become responsible socialist citizens. When the teacher asks for clarification about Sm13's answer that work comprises the basis ("Ausgangspunkt") of everything, other students chime in with answers that included work as the basis of life. The teacher does not seem to notice the difference in these expressions and asks Sm13 to make a full sentence out of the phrase. The student then incorporates the element of "life" into his answer, whereby she insists that he had said something else in his earlier answer. After he still does not provide the exact phrase that she is looking for, she pushes him to specify "whose life?" He gets closer to her desired answer with "for the individual", which she reformulates on the board as "Work is the basis for human life", with the side note that this answer would include individuals anyway. The work involved in the creation of this grand statement could be interpreted to mean that students cooperated in the endeavour to provide an acceptable answer to the teacher that also made sense to them. Still, it falls clearly to the teacher to make the final decisions about how to articulate the lessons that

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students are to learn. What is less clear, despite the technology of camera recordings, especially given the relatively lengthy dialogue between Sm13 and the teacher, is how inclusive the problem‐based instruction was, or even could be. The teacher then transitions to the next step in the

lesson, showing the students a quote from Friedrich Engels that she had already written on the right side of the chalkboard. It is a shortened form of the quotation found in the revised teaching aids, which suggests using it to prepare students from the homework assignment of discussing "The Meaning of Work in Socialism" (Autorenkollektiv 1984, 56). Several students respond after the teacher instructs them to compare the two phrases on the chalkboard ("Work is the basis for human life" and "Work is the source of all wealth. It is the basic condition for life... it created people"). The teacher uses the question about the degree to which work created humans as a bridge to make a joke about Engels, distancing herself from a too dogmatic identification with him or all his ideas: Tf: "(Laughing) Engels also said that humans came from apes, we're not quite of the same opinion there"), and then continues with a brief historical summary of socialist understandings of the relationship between work and humans. These presentations of the material reflect the appendix to the teaching manual that accompanies the new textbooks (Autorenkollektiv 1987, 50). Older textbooks do not include guidelines to follow this line of instruction (Autorenkollektiv 1982, 92‐97); not until the 1984 revised teaching aids does the use of historical knowledge as part of this lesson receive mention. Earlier versions of the teaching aids, in line with the accompanying textbook, foresee the lesson as an introduction to the basic concepts of Article 24 of the GDR's constitution regarding the right of all citizens to work (Autorenkollektiv 1975, 123). In contrast to the clear emphasis on societal perspectives on the topic as outlined in the teaching aids (Autorenkollektiv 1984, 56), the teacher brings the question of the perspective of the individual to the forefront. Most of the students' answers that address the meaning of work within its existential dimension point to their understanding of the teacher's intended goal for the lesson, but they have difficulty constructing the exact sentence that she is looking for. After one student tries and fails to come up with a satisfactory response, the teacher takes over and helps him finish his thought with the provocative formulation, "How you work is how you….(?)" The student then completes the statement: "…live". During the brief sequence in which the teacher departs

from the lesson, Sm10 catches Sm13's eye. Sm13 crosses his arms over his chest, a gesture that Sm10, Sm11 Sm13 immediately imitate. Many interpretations are possible regarding this visible exchange between students; of concern here is more that the scene offers an example of the challenges of analysing the various events in the

classroom. Although the transcripts of this part of the lesson offer a clear illustration of such classroom interactions, the camera is ultimately focused primarily on the "front stage", that is, on the teacher and the way in which she conducts the lesson. A closer look at the scene, however, allows a glimpse into the "back stage", where students typically interact with each other, possibly responding to, but independent of, the teacher's pedagogical aims. Other scenes show similar student activity that might not, at first glance, seem relevant to the lesson and certainly do not belong in the official conceptions of classroom behaviour. Nonetheless, although there are no clear guidelines on how to incorporate these other aspects of class activity in an analysis of this recording about a civics lesson, it is evident that the use of multiple tools of analyses – the video recording itself and its transcription – demonstrate the agency of students that is both part of and removed from the construction of the lesson between the various members of the classroom.

6 Questions for further research The comments of these transcript excerpts pointed to

multiple possibilities for using recordings of classroom instruction in educational research. In order to make sense of the original APW documentation of the hour with video cameras in a historical analysis, other sources are of significant help: lesson plans, teaching aids, textbooks, and contemporary pedagogical discussions (such as the articles of educational journals on the teaching of history and civics, like Geschichtsunterricht und Staatsbürgerkunde). Moreover, an analysis of such a recording can provide information about the teacher's pedagogical objectives, especially in terms of the research program on problem‐centred instruction. In addition to the APW's publication on their evaluation of the recordings, other recordings of events such as education conferences and written observations of classes might also prove fruitful for a further understanding of how this video recording can help further research on the development of civics courses in the GDR. Other research questions opened up by our analysis

here include a further discussion of the degree to which the implementation of new pedagogical models can be reconstructed using historical video recordings, as well as whether different disciplines might need different approaches in such endeavours. It would certainly appear useful to consider video recordings of classrooms within the related secondary literature on pedagogical models of civics lessons (Grammes, Schluß, Vogler 2006; Blessing, Grammes, Schluß 2012). Questions of the role of the cameras as part of a conscious or unconscious "staging" of a lesson are also in need of further scholarly attention, both in order to recognize any distortions that the act of recordings might bring into the lesson and as a

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basis for reflection on how the way a lesson is filmed influences interpretations of what we are actually seeing – or not seeing. Certainly, the interdependence between transcript and recording must be part of such considerations. Finally, we have demonstrated that more analyses of such recorded lessons and transcripts of them are necessary in the on‐going development of a methodology for their use as a historical resource, including new possibilities for accessing the role of civics lessons, but also other disciplines, in the formation of young socialists. We close with the observation that new online data banks make it possible to store entire transcripts of recorded lessons, which the space of printed journals does not generally permit; such an endeavour would significantly enrich our ability to make full use of these sources.

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von 1971 bis Herbst 1989. Zur Zielsetzung, Entwicklung und Kontrolle des ideologischen Schlüsselfaches Staatsbürgerkunde in der polytechnischen Oberschule (POS). Berlin.

Endnotes:

1 See Mirschel (2013) for additional scholarship on

autobiographical sources regarding the APW video recordings.

2 All translations by authors unless otherwise noted. When possible, we have attempted to maintain the language register used during class: The teacher and students in this video recording have a distinctly Berlin accent and use colloquial language at times. As in any classroom setting the teacher and students do not always finish sentences or thoughts, which can be seen in the transcripts.

3 For an in‐depth discussion of "staging" ("Inszenierung"), see Jehle, Schluß 2013, 44‐51.

4 For a discussion of the theory on problem‐centered learning in GDR civics lessons, see Vogler 1997, 226‐239. Note: the English concept of "problem‐based instruction" as currently used is not generally associated with Marxist‐Leninism, although does capture the way in which the lessons are conceptualized (Memory, Yoder, Williams 2003).

Appendix:

German version of quoted/documented discussion in

the article: Sm?: Sie greifen also zu Haschisch, oder, ähm, wern zu

Verbrechern, oder Lw: (Mhm.) Das wolltet ihr sagen, ja, was wolltest du noch

sagen, Marten? Sm13: Naja, dass die dann wahrscheinlich Banken überfallen,

um sich Geld zu verschaffen. Lw: Mhm. S?: Die Jugendkriminalität steigt an. Lw: Ja. Wisst ihr, wo die Jugendkriminalität am höchsten ist? S?: In den USA. Lw: In New York. Ja, ist die Jugend, äh, ist die

Jugendkriminalität, überhaupt die Kriminalität am höchsten. Dort gibt es ganze Stadtviertel, da werden zum Beispiel Ausländer, die nach New York kommen, vorher schon, am Flugplatz, kriegen die ein Schriftstück in die Hand und da wird gesagt, du darfst die und die U‐Bahnlinie nicht benutzen, wir warnen dich davor, in die und die Stadtviertel zu gehen und abends nach soundsoviel Uhr, betrete auf gar keinen Fall die und die Straßen. Weil dort jugendliche Banden, natürlich nun versuchen, sich auf irgendeine Weise ihren Lebensunterhalt zu verdienen. Und das Verbrechertum ist also in New York am höchsten, auf der ganzen Welt. S?: Ick hab mal n Filmbericht jesehn, da ham, ham se en

Jungen ge‐, also festgenommen, der war vierzehn Jahre alt jewesen, der hat n, mit m Messer, hat er vier, is er in n Hotel

eingedrungen, in Fahrstuhl, da hat er vier Leute bedroht, ähm, dass sie ihm den Schmuck und det Jeld geben. Lw: Und das ist keine Seltenheit, nich. Das ist also gang und

gäbe. Wo solln die jungen Menschen nun ihren Lebensunterhalt herbekommen? Es gibt ihnen keiner eine Changse.

Transcriptions Transcription key: Tf – teacher (female) Sf – student (female) Sm – student (male) Ss – students (plural) ( ) – unclear (xxx) – quiet or difficult to understand (number) – Pause, in seconds @ ‐ Laughter @xxx@ / @xxx – spoken laughingly └ ‐ overlapping ° ‐ change in camera angle

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