Tim Wrote:
> Which part of it do you find incredible, that the students are able to
> organize their own learning, both socially and conceptually, without the
> preparatory coursework? They can and have been doing this since we
> introduced the alternate track in 1990.
>
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 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.
Nate
> I think there is a certain sheltering here, but I think it is a
sheltering
> of the curriculum itself rather than of students within a curriculum.
> Because this is being done within the confines of a certain kind of
> professional school, it is possible to exert more control over what gets
> taught and how it gets taught than would be possible in some other
> situation (e.g., an undergraduate department trying to shift to a more
> PBL-oriented teaching approach, a graduate program in which the
curriculum
> is less uniform across students). Medical schools, therefore, have the
> luxury of doing something like this that might be difficult or impossible
> in some other setting. The curricular innovation is sheltered,
therefore,
> from the things, e.g., grades, requirements from outside classes,
> scheduling constraints, that would otherwise interfer with implementing a
> program of this type.
> ---Tim
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