Re: the calculus wars

Timothy Koschmann (tkoschmann who-is-at acm.org)
Fri, 18 Jun 1999 13:31:08 -0500

Nate wrote:
>I have no doubt that students can organize their own learning without
>prepartory coursework. Clinton is telling us we all should do that with a
>discourse of lifelong learning. I question students organizing their own
>learning being seen as an essential good. In bringing in Foucault again, is
>that just not having students taking over the dicipline role in contrast to
>the teacher. I guess my concern has to do with "ownership",
>"responsibility" etc. being an essential good. This is the same concern I
>have with Lave and Wenger in that we can decenter learning without
>decentering power. One can have a student centered educational
>environment that gives better results than a teacher centered one, in
>general, the teacher centered one is not very successful which is why we
>talk of learning needing to be the motivation. I guess I don't see
>"student centered" in itself as anything radical. Rather the question that
>would come to my mind is how have they transformed their practice. Is
>transforming and being transformed different in the outcome or are they
>different approaches at the same outcome.

I think it is appropriate to link together discussions of student-centered
teaching and the broader discourse about lifelong learning. The object of
student-centered methods is, afterall, to foster skills for lifelong
learning. But let me play the Devil's advocate, Nate, and ask in what ways
and in what situations would it ever not be good to be a lifelong learner?
Who would be in favor of arrested learning? I suppose if your object was
to produce drones for mindless assembly line work, lifelong learning might
be seen in a negative light, but I can't see why anyone else would be
opposed (at least in principle) to the idea of fostering the development of
skills for lifelong learning.

>I am also seeing transformation in a particular way as a critical social
>consciousness. In an SOE environment that could be the "praxis" that Diane
>has shared about, but it seems to be beyond a conversation of being student
>centered or not. So often the student/teacher centered dichotomy can
>just be a diversion of tweedle dee and tweddle dum which gives us two
>different paths to the same destination.

I would argue that the development of skills for lifelong learning is a
necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the emergence of a critical
social perspective. By this argument, student-centered teaching has an
inherent subversive aspect to it---once you give 'em the tools for managing
their own learning, there's no way to control just what it is that they are
going to choose to learn.
---Tim