ABSTRACT
The chapter serves as an extended introduction, outlaying the book's main focus and presenting the most prominent concepts. The book views teaching and learning as content transformations between culture, individuals, and the world. Following questions: How to bring content closer to students? and How to invite students closer to the content? it provides a theoretical framework, research methodology, and instruments for reflecting teaching and learning in the classroom. The chapter starts with an overview of how the triad of teaching-content-learning is understood in the European tradition of didactics and in the Anglo-American research on content-focused teaching and learning. In this context, the theory of content transformation constitutes the core of further elaboration, employing the concepts of cultural mediation of the content, psychological-logical distinction, active content, instrumentation of experience, negotiation of meanings, cognitive changes, and others. Based on this, the chapter advertises a novel approach (Methodology 3A) for analysing and improving teaching and learning, which also serves as a tool for teacher professional development. Didactic case studies coming up from the M3A reveal prototypical failures (didactic formalisms) that threaten to compromise the quality of learning as well as prototypical virtues (didactic excellence) that verifiably support students' learning. The chapter discusses these issues in the context of the quality of education.
