Lehrerhandeln als Entscheiden – eine praxeologisch-wissenssoziologische Konzeptualisierung des Professionswissens von Lehrpersonen

In this paper, we present initial empirical findings from our research project “Professionalization of Teachers in the Subjects of Mathematics and English” (ProME). We investigate how teachers arrive at their everyday decisions and what role (organizational, societal, and subject-related) norms play in these decision-making processes. The episodic interview and the Documentary Method serve as the data collection and analysis methods. We undertake a metatheoretical (re)conceptualization of the notion of decision-making: decisions are thereby linked to the definition of the orientation framework in a broad sense according to Bohnsack and understood, with reference to Luhmann, as reactions to expectations. In the empirical analyses presented in this paper, we focus on an English teacher and two Mathematics teachers and demonstrate how these teachers routinize habitus-norm tensions in decision-making, providing us with access to the orientation framework in a broad sense. We distinguish these from non-routinized decisions, in which we see potential for habitus transformations.