Learner-centred Education in International Perspective

Whose pedagogy for whose development?

Michele Schweisfurth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136729126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Is learner-centred education appropriate for all societies and classrooms?

Learner-centred education (LCE) is a travelling policy, widely promoted by international agencies and national governments. Arguments in favour of this pedagogical tradition refer to theories and evidence from cognitive psychology, claiming that all learners can benefit equally from its judicious use. Beyond the benefits to the individual however, lie a set of assumptions about learner-centred education as a foundation for the building of democratic citizens and societies, suitable for economies of the future. These promises have been questioned by critics who doubt that it is appropriate in all cultural and resource contexts, and there is considerable evidence in the global South of perennial problems of implementation.

In the light of these debates, is LCE still a good development 'bet'? This book provides an authoritative and balanced investigation of these issues, exploring the contextual factors from global movements to local resourcing realities which have fuelled it as a discourse and affected its practice. In the light of the theoretical underpinnings and research evidence, the book addresses pressing questions: to what extent is learner-centred education a sound choice for policy and practice in developing countries? And if it is a sound choice, under which conditions is it a viable one?

The book is divided into three key parts:

- Learner-centred Education as a Global Phenomenon
- Learner-centred Education in Lower and Middle-income Countries
- Lessons and Resolutions
This book provides a much-needed fresh analysis of the concept and practice of LCE. It will be valuable reading for academics and post-graduates with a focus on comparative and international education, along with policy-makers in developing countries and development agencies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203817438-1

How we learn is partly a question of our cognitive physiology, and partly a question of how we learn to learn during our formative years. It is also a product of the policy choices that shape the education we experience, and the practices of the teachers who influence us, all set within wider contextual realities. In developing countries, these contextual realities bite. Internationally, at least 60 million children of school-going age do not attend school.¹ This is a tragedy. But equally tragic is the number of children who are in school but are learning little, or who are studying a curriculum irrelevant to their current lives and future needs, and who are experiencing schooling largely as a combination of boredom, fear and wishful thinking. These are factors which contribute to poor learning outcomes, dropout and school refusal, and so hinder both personal and national development. There are many who believe that so-called learner-centred education (LCE) has the power to change this.

This book aims to investigate this belief through a sustained engagement with the possibilities, complexities and dilemmas associated with this pedagogical tradition. It is concerned with LCE as a phenomenon, but also the practicalities of its implementation as a policy and in classrooms, particularly in developing countries. The book re-examines and reframes the narratives which proponents have used to justify LCE. It explores the contextual factors, from global movements through local resourcing realities, which have fuelled it as a discourse and affected its practice. The discussion draws on both primary and secondary research data to set out case studies which exemplify all of these. In the light of these various theoretical underpinnings and research evidence of the practical realities, the book returns to these pressing questions at various points: to what extent is LCE a sound choice for policy and practice in developing countries? And if it is a sound choice, under what conditions is it a viable one?

Approach to the Issue

This book is situated within the broader field(s) of comparative and international education, to harness the power of an international perspective to provide a more comprehensive picture than any single-country or purely theoretical study can do. While most studies of LCE are single-country and rather limited in scope, the recent proliferation of writing on LCE points to a growing scholarly interest in this area. For example, at least 72 articles concerned with LCE in developing countries have appeared in the International Journal for Educational Development in the past 30 years, with an intensification of interest over that period (Schweisfurth 2011). The consolidation of these multiple smaller-scale studies into an evidence base is one strand of this book’s approach to the topic of LCE.

This international perspective is further developed through a retrospective reworking of my own studies on pedagogy in four countries, in the light of the theoretical frameworks developed in this book. This research spans the past 15 years, supplemented with new data on current policy and practice. The study is global and cross-national, but also personal. I have long been concerned with LCE, although, like many teachers, in my early years as a practitioner I was not always consciously aware of the philosophical and practical influences that had indoctrinated me into this pedagogical approach. As a teacher and teacher educator in the 1980s and 1990s, I worked in various phases of education in Sierra Leone, Canada, Indonesia, Scotland and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Throughout this period I practised variations of LCE, and encouraged others to do the same, replicating some of my own schooling experiences and reflecting the strongly pro-LCE pre-service teacher education I underwent in Canada. Later research developed this theme in a more critical and analytical vein, in studies of LCE as a democratic pedagogy in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Communist Russia (Schweisfurth 2002a), The Gambia (Schweisfurth 2002b and 2008) and Rwanda (Schweisfurth 2006a). More recently, research on international students in UK universities and Chinese returnees as pedagogical border crossers (Schweisfurth and Gu 2009; Gu et al. 2009; Schweisfurth 2012) has revealed the contrast in teaching environments that mobile students experience, and explored their initial cognitive dissonance and processes of adjustment. Within these new experiences, encounters with LCE are paramount challenges and joys for international students.

This range of experiences and expertise has facilitated a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the issue, essential for the understanding of ideas and policies which have global credentials and a range of national manifestations (Steiner-Khamsi 2011). There are strong justifications for stepping back from single-country or prescriptive analyses. LCE is a travelling idea and a travelling policy. Travelling policies are those which move and are adopted across different sites, shaped by the activity of supra-national and transnational agencies, and by shared educational agendas (Ozga and Jones 2006). The ‘borrowing’ of policy across contexts is a significant dimension of the contemporary policy landscape. LCE’s transfer, translation and transformation (Cowen 2009) across the world attests to the power of its cross-national attractiveness as a pedagogy. Beyond this bilateral lending and borrowing, LCE is a global phenomenon, enshrined in international agreements, promoted by international agencies and powerful at a supranational level. Educationists are increasingly concerned with how ideas and policy move around the world, in a context of globalisation. As Carney (2009: 63) notes:

Recent critiques of comparative education suggest that we must move beyond the study of bounded and stable education systems, levels and processes, and acknowledge the ways in which educational phenomena – from policy visions to practices – are increasingly interconnected.

Specifically in relation to developing countries, questions are raised about how appropriate LCE is as a policy choice, and what cross-national and global influences shape the planning of educational policy in these contexts. Given the rhetorical nature of many policy proclamations regarding LCE, and the normative positions adopted in relation to it, it could be considered an example of ‘discursive borrowing’ (Steiner-Khamsi and Stolpe 2006): more words than impact are in evidence. It is important to consider these questions of transfer and adoption, and the controversial hegemonies concerned, in relation to LCE. The tensions between the global and the local are particularly acute when they pull at something as controversial and culture-bound as pedagogy. In its concern with the movement of ideas and policies and how global and local contexts affect these, and with its focus on developing countries and its policy and practice-oriented desire for improved learning opportunities for all, this book ‘bridges the cultures and traditions’ (Crossley and Watson 2003) of the fields of comparative and international education.

This analysis in comparative and international perspective of the primary and secondary empirical evidence also needs framing in a thorough conceptual revisiting of LCE, and this is a further important dimension of this study’s approach. Here the book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of LCE. Theories from cognitive psychology, critical sociology, development studies and contemporary economics have all fuelled the popularity of LCE. The narratives which they have generated are often entangled: Chapter 3 will set out to clarify these distinctive points of view, and the emergent interdisciplinary framework will inform what follows. I make no apology for the wide-ranging nature of the theoretical framework and the evidence base: this is what makes this book unique, and, I would argue, provides a ‘bird’s-eye’ view of this global issue that extends beyond geographical coverage.

Structure of the Book

The remainder of the book is organised into three parts, with twelve chapters, as follows. Part 1 (Chapters 2 to 4) focuses on LCE as a concept, and as a travelling policy with local contextualisations. Chapter 2 sets out to define learner-centred education and to provide a very brief overview of its provenance, contrasts and critics. The third chapter analyses and delineates three variations on the LCE theme. It explores the three main justificatory narratives of LCE: how it contributes to learning effectiveness, learner emancipation and learner preparation for the contemporary and future worlds. In Chapter 4, I consider how contexts are important for LCE. LCE may in many ways be a cosmopolitan phenomenon, moving across borders and promoted in supra-national spaces such as UN agencies. However, the particular national or local context is a barrier, facilitator and shaper for LCE, and a long list of contextual forces emerges, including the education system, politics, culture, resources and the economy, among others.

The second part of the book turns to the particular situations of low-and middle-income countries, and how LCE has been manifested as a policy, and, more problematically, a practice, in these contexts. Chapter 5 explores LCE’s perennial implementation failure in developing countries. It analyses the research evidence in this regard with reference to the other narratives and the contexts set out in the previous chapter. The next five chapters set out a series of case studies which illustrate different variations of LCE in a range of national and cultural contexts. Each case is constructed from a carefully chosen variety of policy and research literature as well as evidence from my own empirical work. Each of these cases has a tale to tell about the challenges, interpretations or benefits of LCE which offers a new lens on the question of contexts for LCE implementation, and both the similarities and differences between the cases are of interest. The national case studies are The Gambia, China, Russia and South Africa, all from the lower to middle range of the Human Development Index, and each with experience of policy-level and local interventions in LCE. The fifth case, on the other hand, explores the pedagogical adaptations of mobile learners, most of whom are from low-to-middle income countries, in higher education. The inclusion of this perspective helps to query some of the assumptions about individuals’ adaptations to new learning styles that have been part of the debate about the problems with LCE.

The final section of the book moves the debate on LCE forward by integrating the theoretical and empirical literature with the presented cases. It does so with a view to suggesting approaches for the future which have the best chance of maintaining the fundamental and most promising aspects of LCE while avoiding the problems that have plagued its understanding and implementation. Chapter 11 extracts ten key lessons learnt from the sustained analysis of LCE, and what these mean for its conceptualisation and practical implementation. Finally, given this extended engagement with theory and evidence, to what extent is this implementation to be aimed for in developing countries? In the final chapter I strive for a reconceptualisation of LCE in the light of the range of theories set out, the newer and older empirical evidence, and the analysis of contexts for LCE in developing countries: it extends the discussion beyond the dichotomies of LCE and its opposites, of implementation and failure, of global and local imperatives, and beyond prescriptive discourses, in the quest for a more contextualised and coherent view.

Finally, before proceeding, it is necessary to have a brief word about language. Development is a multi-faceted concept, and all countries want to develop more, and so there is no world which is not, at least aspirationally, the developing world. South and North and East and West as geographical concepts are nonsense. (East of where? Where does Australia fit?) Poverty is widely distributed in both richer and poorer countries, with rich elites existing in the poorest places and impoverished underclasses found in the richest nations, and low or middle income is in any case only one of many indicators of development for a country. Conceptual terms also come in and out of fashion and are more or less appropriate in different contexts. But somehow, if we are to champion improved education and life chances for those people who live in poverty in countries where this is the norm – i.e. the world’s majority – we must use a language of some kind to describe these categories of people and nations. Readers may have noticed already that I have slipped fairly randomly between the terms above, all of which are widely in use. I will use them fairly interchangeably, with the exception that I will use ‘West’ and ‘East’ to refer primarily to cultural distinctions, while ‘North’ and ‘South’, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, or ‘more’ or ‘less developed’, or ‘industrialised’, ‘richer’ or ‘poorer’, will refer mainly to overall levels based on the human development indices (HDI) found in the UN Human Development Report. But I will not be so randomly specific as to say that the upper half of the HDI table is one category, and the lower half, another. I hope that readers will be sympathetic and be able to accommodate the awkwardness of these discourses, and to make this easier, I will stop using inverted commas. Finally, while this book is concerned primarily with such so-called developing countries, this is not its exclusive focus, not least because of the difficulties in defining what constitutes this category. Within the case studies, for example, Russia and China, ostensibly middle income countries, receive attention because of the significance of LCE in these policy contexts, Russian and Chinese contributions to the wider debate on LCE and the scale and strategic importance of these countries as educational examples and models.

Part I Learner-Centred Education as a Global Phenomenon

2 Learner-Centred Education Definitions and Provenance

DOI: 10.4324/9780203817438-2

This chapter aims to pin down the rather slippery discourse around learner-centred education, in order to provide a clear set of characteristics which define LCE for the purposes of this book. It then sets out some of historical antecedents for the current question of LCE’s adoption in developing countries. It also documents some of the critiques of LCE as a phenomenon, outwith its status in the Global South. This chapter is a necessarily brief contextualisation of the debate in anticipation of the more detailed analysis which follows.

Learner-Centred Education as a Phenomenon

LCE is not simple to define, not least because of the plethora of associated terms including, for example, progressive education, problem-based or enquiry-based learning, constructivism and child-centred learning. Although they are sometimes used interchangeably, each of these has slightly different connotations, emphases or different target learners. Problem-based learning, for example, has gained credence in higher education internationally as an approach to teaching and learning which is based on collaborative, research-based investigations into a real-life problem. Child-centred pedagogy (discussed below) has developed with young learners in mind, based on a particular model of childhood. Progressive education as a broad synonym for LCE connotes it as a positive modern alternative to traditional pedagogies, and is linked to wider social movements promoting social reform and egalitarianism. The danger is that with so many terms in such wide and loose usage, the discourse of LCE risks becoming not only ‘vacuous’, but ‘mischievous’ (Kliebard 1995).

Since LCE is so many things to so many people, it might be easier to begin to understand LCE by contrasting it with the concepts and practices to which it is opposed, and this is what John Dewey did in defining this vision of ‘the new’ ‘progressive’ education:

If one attempts to formulate the philosophy of education implicit in the practices of the new education, we may, I think, discover certain common principles amid the variety of progressive schools now existing. To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill is opposed acquisition of them as a means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of all opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world.

(Dewey 1938: 223)

To unpack these contrasts further, firstly, LCE is not based on learning a rigid content-based curriculum. Many countries have a more or less fixed and prescriptive national curriculum; it is more challenging to be truly learner-centred under these conditions, as what needs to be covered and at what pace are not negotiable. This is the foundation of what Freire (1972) has termed the ‘banking’ model of education: knowledge is deposited from the teacher into the student, like depositing money in a bank. Another image that is sometimes used is that of a teacher pouring knowledge into the empty vessel of the learner.

From a learner-centred perspective, there are a number of problems with this, and much of the literature in the LCE tradition goes to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• List of figures and tables
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Learner-Centred Education as a Global Phenomenon
• Part II Learner-Centred Education in Lower-and Middle-Income Countries
• Part III Lessons and Resolutions
• Notes
• References
• Index