The student voice

That's been the focus of my attention for the past couple of days. It's an interesting sentiment, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.

One of the claims that was made was that all education is in effect learner-centered because it is all about getting students through the system in a meaningful way. This is to my mind a bit of a stretch. It makes too many assumptions, the most pernicious being that we (whoever that is) know in no uncertain terms what is best for the future. Unfortunately, the history of the world reveals to us we have precious little clue. No, this is system-centered instruction, at best.

Another assertion of learner-centeredness masquerades as technology-enhanced instruction. The use of technology, especially social-networking tools, promotes interaction amongst learners and helps them learn better. One group participating in this discussion maintains that all interaction promotes learning, another group claims that the technology itself is driving and promoting this. Unfortunately, this is technology-centered instruction, nothing more.

Another strain of thought (which tried my patience) is that giving the students themselves more say makes for learner-centered instruction. Given that I can remember how much I knew when I was 18 compared to how little I know today, I'd say this is little more than a cop-out. My experience has been that most young people rightfully want a lot, but don't really know what they really want, for you need a bit more (sometimes painful) experience to figure that all out. This is more a notion of self-centered instruction than anything else.

In my mind, learner-centered teaching/instruction/... must truly start with the learner, that is, the individual who wants to/must/should/will learn. This means, by default, that we must have a clear idea of what we understand learning to be. It's not clear to me that there is general agreement on what this is. My reading and experience has shown me that regardless of whether it is acquisition of knowledge, skill development, effective ordering of thought, problem-solving or even all of these, learning has one significant and outstanding characteristic: it is individual. No two people learn alike. No two individuals in any given learning situation will learn exactly the same thing. In other words, learner-centered instruction must, by nature, be individualized instruction.

Anti-teaching ... really?

In my day job, I have to deal a lot with trying to get adult-education teachers and vocational trainers into the 21st century. In other words, I have been tasked with helping get our collective head around the latest information and communication technology (ICT). It's not an easy job, and it's not a pretty picture. This is not because this class of educator is particularly put off by new technology, it's more of case of them not seeing why it may be useful. After all, we've been talking at students and seminar participants for years now, and nobody's really complained, and they seem to be getting it, and their employers are generally satisfied ... so why all this new stuff?

I find the question particularly legitimate. Have we really shown that there is any advantage to ICT in any classroom. On the one hand, we have the fact that an increasing number of our learners are simply at home in the new technologies. In one of the EU projects in which I am involved (TeNeGEN: Connect the TEachers to reach and teach the NEt GENeration www.tenegen.eu), this was the starting point for developing materials and courses to help get our target group more up-to-speed with their students. Sure, we're making some progress, but there is a deeper issue involved, namely change.

It's not so much that our target group educators are anti-technology, for I'm convinced that most of them are not, rather, we need to think about new ways of structuring, organizing and facilitating instruction. As was mentioned in the last posting, involvement and interaction and doing and experience are especially important factors in the learning process. We've known this for a long time now, but only recently has enough momentum built that we can actually start acting upon this knowledge.

One of those whose blazing the trail into the areas of new learning is Mike Wesch at Kansas State University. If you haven't already, I can only recommend and encourage you to stop over and take a look at his "Brief Philosophy of Anti-Teaching" which was originally published on the Savage Minds blog. This is a great introduction to thinking differently about what we're doing in the classroom. And, for those of you who are more visual, there's a YouTube video from him that is worth a watch, too.