Rethinking what it means to be a teacher through a mixed modality approach

Abstract

For a century or more debates about the central purpose of education have tended to oscillate between two long-standing, apparently contradictory viewsi . In one view, often termed knowledge or subject centred it is argued that education’s purpose is to build students’ intellectual capacity through exposure to certain kinds knowledge; “the best that has been thought and said” (Arnold, 1869/1960, p. 6). In this argument knowledge ‘comes first’. This ‘knowledge’ approach has tended to be associated with a negative static, ‘one-size fits all’ curriculum of unchanging facts taught with a rote learning pedagogy. In the second view, often termed student-centred or progressive, the concern is more with process than content, and the child’s personal social and learning needs come first. Knowledge is secondary and acts as the conduit for realising the innate potential of the student. More recently proponents of this view often suggest that education is not about learning ‘things’ but about ‘learning how to learn’. The teacher becomes a facilitator and ‘co-constructs’ knowledge with the student.