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Research Articles:
Teaching and Learning
The relationship between
teaching and learning, what and how teachers teach, and how
and what learners learn has long been a subject of
controversy. The two, sometimes extreme, positions adopted
by those who engage in it can be loosely described as, on
the one hand, “traditional” and, on the other, “progressive.”
The traditional position
starts from the assumption, taken to be so obvious as not to
be open to question, that the purpose of teaching is to
ensure that those taught acquire a prescribed body of
knowledge and set of values. Both knowledge and values are
taken to reflect a society’s selection of what it most wants
to transmit to its future citizens and requires its future
workforce to be able to do.
An important
characteristic of this traditional view is that it seeks to
convey what is already known and, at some level, approved.
The relationship between teacher and learner is determined
thereby. The learner is seen as the person who does not yet
have the required knowledge or values and the teacher as the
person who has both and whose function it is to convey them
to the learner.
From the nature of this
relationship, a number of things follow: the systematic
transmission of knowledge and values from teacher to learner
needs to proceed smoothly. That requires well-behaved
learners and a disciplined environment, if necessary
externally imposed with sanctions for failures in
compliance. Teaching and learning also benefit from
carefully designed syllabuses and prescribed curriculum
content. Furthermore, as what has to be learned can be set
out in full, stage by stage, from the start of the
educational process to its conclusion, it follows that what
is taught can be regularly tested and that each stage of
teaching and learning can best be seen as a preparation for
the next. It also follows that, as individual learners learn
at different speeds and are capable of reaching different
levels of achievement, it seems sensible to arrange learners
in groups of similar abilities, either at different schools
or in graduated classes within schools. Finally, so far as
human motivation is concerned, competition is seen to be the
predominant way to encourage learners or institutions to
strive to improve their performance in relation to that of
others.
The opposed view, broadly
described as “progressive” or “child-centered,” starts from
the learner rather than from any predetermined body of
knowledge. On this view, the function of the teacher, from
parent in the earliest years right through the years of
school attendance, is to be aware of each child’s capacity
and stage of development. The primary importance of
children’s learning, which in turn is taken to depend on
that stage of development, requires each of those stages to
be seen as important in its own right rather than as a
preparation for some later stage. An eight-year-old child,
for example, is seen as an eight year old to be developed to
his or her full potential as an eight year old, rather than
as a future nine or fifteen year old. The curriculum itself
tends to be seen, in the words of the Report of the
Consultative Committee on the Primary School as open-ended
and inquiry-based: “the curriculum is to be thought of in
terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to
be acquired and facts to be stored.”
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