Interconnectedness and Defragmentation

In the 2009 founded GDM-Working Group "Interconnectedness in Mathematics Education", a traditional and central requirement for learning mathematics is considered anew: "Mathematical knowledge and skills should not be taught and learned separately from each other, meaninglessly and unrelatedly, but in their interrelation, connected. A lot of criticism relates to a widespread lesson design, in which one or two types of algorithms for a calculation are trained for the next performance review for a few weeks and then forgotten again. (…) When acquiring central skills such as modelling and problem solving, as many areas of school mathematics as possible should be connected in order to obtain a rich supply of tools and problem solving techniques. But it is also about a holistic (insight) view of mathematics. Students should recognize that mathematics is much more than just calculating (numerical) results using given formulas.” See also description of the working group on the GDM homepage or at the external homepage of the working group)

The working group publishes the series "Mathe vernetzt" with didactical thoughts and teaching material (in German up to now); in 2022 volume 7 was published by MUED (see here).

In the context of the „Quality Offensive in Teacher Education” ("Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung") of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) the Centre of Teacher Education and Didactics (ZLF) of the University of Passau applied successfully in order to react to deficits in teacher training, which are discussed under the headings of "institutional segmentation", "marginalisation of student teachers" and "fragmentation of training content". With respect to the latter representing the idea of interconnectedness, the subproject mathematics (Professorship for Didactics of Mathematics & Professorship for Pure Mathematics) developed the "Digital Interactive Mathematical Maps". More detailed information can be found on the project page.