Students Must Have Agency if They’re Going to Learn Anything
Progressive, traditional, or anything in between – if a model of education gives no agency to learners, then it’s by definition flawed, argues Gareth Sturdy…
If you’re all for a greater emphasis on subject knowledge in our education system, as I am, then beware. A concerning trend is developing among those of us keen to see schools move away from a preoccupation with exam data, skills or therapy.
The truth is, we’ve been almost exclusively fixated on ethos, policies and systems, or the role of the teacher; but rarely do you hear discussion of what the pupils are supposed to be doing, beyond serving as a stage army in our battle for a different kind of education.
We’re currently in the exam prep season. In a few months’ time, we’ll be interrogated about our classes’ results. Where students have performed poorly, weary teachers will need to explain yet again to their managers that teaching and learning are a partnership.
Teachers can only do so much. The pupil has to do something too, and in fact, this is the final and all-important link in the chain.
Without the student actively working, there is no educational success. Indeed, would anyone want students who worked hard and students who didn’t to achieve the same results? Surely we demand a model of the pupil that puts their own agency at the centre?
Yet for some time now, schools of all types have put all the emphasis on the teacher: where a student is slow or resistant to work, the teacher is expected necessarily to be able to fix it.
This is the same thinking that says if you plan good lessons and teach well, everyone in the class will behave properly and make progress. It’s the kind of thing people who don’t teach much say – and it’s nonsense.
Just tell them
This is particularly an issue for ‘knowledge-led’ schools, of which an increasing number are adopting a ‘just tell them’ pedagogy. That can be seen as an understandable reaction to the constructivist theory of teaching, born out of postmodern philosophy developed in the post-war era and now educational orthodoxy across the UK.
According to this idea, children are co-creators of their knowledge. Hence, the role of the teacher is not to didactically transmit knowledge, filling young heads up like empty pails, but rather, to facilitate learning. To enable youngsters to discover information and theories for themselves, and build up their own maps of meaning.
To the pro-knowledge fraternity, this well-meaning philosophy has proved disastrous and left several generations of children ignorant and culturally bereft, as Robert Peal explains in his excellent book ‘Progressively Worse’.
So the reaction has been to put knowledge back in its rightful seat, demoting skills, feelings, creativity and character-building to lower positions in the hierarchy.
So far so good. Holding up the importance of knowledge is what schools should be doing. But what then often gets missed is that, for all its faults, constructivism at least assigned a proactive role to the student.
The ‘just tell them’ philosophy, on the other hand, necessarily treats pupils as passive, and is liable to lead to yet more belief that success or failure lies exclusively in the hands of the teacher.
What next?
While no fan of postmodern theory, I nevertheless believe that learning is more than simply doing what the teacher says. Yes, in the classroom the teacher is the ultimate authority, and pupils must routinely do what the teacher says simply because he or she says so.
I am one of the strict ones, whom it takes pupils weeks to get to settle down with because I’m always enforcing the rules. And I’m proud of that. The loss of teacher authority is one of the major crises blighting education today.
But I think there is a lot more to teaching than ‘just telling them’, and more to learning than doing what the teacher asks. What happens after we’ve just told them?
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that pupils come to school with a mix of socially determined cultural capital, and dispositions that control how that individual reacts to the world and makes sense of it.
Bernard Charlot, another sociologist – who remains little translated into English – takes this idea further. Charlot doesn’t argue that pupils are creators of their own knowledge, but he is interested in the ‘relations to knowledge’ that pupils hold.
He invites us to investigate the meaning pupils attach to study, or the resistance to study. He encourages us not to see students as a passive herd in need of motivation, but as ‘internal engines of study’ in need of mobilisation.
Intellectual worlds
Education is not all about the K-word, as important as it is. The debate over knowledge versus skills is getting tired and boring. It’s time to move on. To paraphrase TS Eliot, the important thing is not knowledge, but what you do with it.
For this reason, I think we should stop harping on about it, and start talking about intellect instead. This can’t be taught in the abstract, and only arises out of a solid grounding in subjects and their disciplinary knowledge. However it expands out into a further dimension, too.
It’s important for us not to assume that the pupils in front of us have the same relationship to knowledge as we do.
Do we know enough about the meaning children attach to going to school? Why do they think they’re doing what they’re doing? Do we know how to truly mobilise their internal engines of study? What value might they attach to resisting school? Rather than simply transmit knowledge, can we build intellectual worlds for them and invite them to make a home there?
After all, you can lead a child to knowledge – like a horse to water – but you can’t make it think.
Gareth Sturdy is a science teacher in south London. He can be found on Twitter @stickyphysics.
Join the conversation
The Academy of Ideas Education Forum gathers monthly to discuss trends in educational policy, theory and practice. On Monday, April 23rd, the topic will be ‘The Rise of Scripted Teaching’.
Find out more at academyofideas.org.uk/forums/education_forum.
