Introduction

Pedagogy today mainly refers to the kind of theoretical and empirical research which is based on a concept of objectivity or oriented at the principle of consensus deriving from reading social reality as if it were a text (cp. “linguistic turn”) - it is to say: as if social reality is ruled by completeness, closeness, unambiguity and linearity (Oser 1997, Wulf 2007). The praxeology of pedagogical thinking and practice is then more or less reduced to certain norms, definite interventions in well-defined pedagogical situations. Today in the frame of school, to impart available knowledge and abilities oriented at certain objectives is regarded as the main aim. In general, pedagogical as well as pedagogically intended knowledge and abilities are broadly interpreted as psychometric competences. In this view, the more tacit side of pedagogical sceneries as the implicit meanings of spoken and written statements, modes of body-communication and -interaction, inexplicable knowledge, iconic representations, didactical operations and commodities as well as architectural environments is more or less neglected. These tacit dimensions of pedagogy constitute a sort of incidental scenery. This scenery might open, grant or might also close the significant ways of teaching and learning; it might empower learners and teachers in understanding, transcending and creating the world or constrain them in doing this. Diverse phenomenological, constructivist and post-structural perspectives even regard reflection itself as a “secondary experience”, ciphered out from a basic pre-reflexive multiplicity, e.g. of experiences. Thus, finding ourselves in a concrete situation, we tend to complete our actual experiences by interpreting the explicit, i.e. by reconstructing the invisible sides of the situation, realizing the unsaid as it is revealed, and by focusing on issues read between the lines. In doing so we often recur to a corporally conveyed experiential knowledge, and we come back to it whenever we want to decide whether or how something makes sense to us. Thus, there seems to be a tacit side of getting insights and scientific examination. By taking over an empirical-praxeological perspective our group mainly attends to the question how social practices constitute a (binding) reality. Of special interest is the question to what extent tacit dimensions are part of this process. As a methodology, praxeology refers to approaches in the field of “Sociology of Culture” (Bourdieu, Reckwitz), “Sociology of Knowledge” (Mannheim, Bohnsack) and the “Chicago School” (Mead, Goffman et al.). It has its roots in phenomenological (Alfred Schütz et al.), in interpretative-hermeneutical approaches (Berger, Luckmann, Geertz, Goffman), in semiotic-structuralistic (Saussure, Eco, Foucault), pragmatical (Peirce et al.) und analytical approaches (Wittgenstein). In pedagogy, the term praxeology connected to names as Josef Derbolav, Dietrich Benner et al. A praxeological theory conceptualizes sociality as an anthropological fact, generated in dynamic and relational processes. In social practices and contextual structures orders are transmitted, constituted and created/established. The focus lies on corporal, performative and on the emergent aspects of the practices by which “substantiality” (Wirklichkeit) is generated. “Substantiality” is, beside others, facetted as the logic of practice (Bourdieu), as the meaningful other (Mead), as the social construction of reality (Berger & Luckmann) and as the spaces of common experience (Mannheim). A praxeological approach reconstructs social practices in order to reveal their underlying levels of meaning. This entails the transition of the question from what (happens) to how (reality is constituted) which implicates to leave aside objectivistic claims of truth and presumptions of subjective motives