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For you to do:
Reflect on your experiences as an educator. Have any of these dilemmas come
up in your own work? For example, have you experienced conflicts caused by plans
to introduce single-sex work in your centre? Have you struggled with questions
of how far you can put forward your own views?
Reflect on your experiences as a learner. What would learner-centred have meant
in the context of your own learning? Would you want a course where you were
simply asked what you wanted to study? How do you feel about courses which are
clear about the curriculum and aim to teach you the field? When would you look
for a more or less learner-centred curriculum?
Comments
My experience as a learner is that learner-centred has meant that I want some
courses where I am told clearly what will be in the course and so can decide
whether it has relevance to me or not. I will be especially keen to take part
in a course with a clear curriculum when I want a chance to explore a broad
topic, or when I am new to a field. In other courses I am happy to have the
content drawn out more from the group and evolve as we go along. In either case,
I want processes to help me integrate the new knowledge with my own previous
knowledge. I want to be respected as a knower, but I also expect the facilitator
to have knowledge to share. In literacy education I think we often disregard
the value of developing new knowledge in a dialogue with others.
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Do women learn differently from men?
When theorists have begun to pay attention to the particular needs of women,
there has been some interesting consideration of whether women learn in particular
ways which are different from men. If so this might influence programming for
women. One example is the work by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule (1986)
which studies women's ways of knowing. From their research with North American
women, Belenky et al. identify five 'epistemological perspectives from
which women seem to know and view the world'. Their categories, formatted as
a list to make them clearer, are:
- silence, a position in which women experience themselves as mindless
and voiceless and subject to the whims of external authority;
- received knowledge, a perspective from which women conceive of themselves
as capable of receiving, even reproducing, knowledge from the all-knowing
external authorities but not capable of creating knowledge on their own
- subjective knowledge, a perspective from which truth and knowledge
are conceived of as personal, private, and subjectively known or intuited;
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