New roles for learners
Let us consider the principles which guide much of today's thinking in regard to standards for teaching and learning in a knowledge- or information-driven society. The following principles have been adapted from Zemelman, Daniels & Hyde (1998: 8) and Callison (2001: 58-59):
- Student-centred – Considered the best starting point for schooling is learners' interests, with investigating students' own questions across the curriculum taking precedence over study of arbitrarily/distantly selected content.
- Experiential – Active, hands-on, concrete experience is considered the most powerful and natural form of learning.
- Holistic – The belief that learners learn best when they encounter whole ideas, events, and materials in purposeful contexts.
- Authentic – The conviction that real, rich, complex ideas and materials should be central to the curriculum.
- Expressive – Employing a whole range of media – speech, writing, drawing, poetry, dance, drama, music, movement, and visual arts – to encourage engagement of ideas and construction of meaning.
- Reflective – Learners need to reflect upon and debrief on how well they have actioned, thought and learned.
- Social – The belief that learning is socially constructed and often interactional, and teachers need to create classroom interactions that scaffold learning.
- Collaborative – Cooperative learning activities which tap the social power of learning are preferable to an individualistic and competitive approach.
- Democratic – That the classroom should model community practice, with learners learning their rights, responsibilities as citizens, and ways to contribute to the community.
- Cognitive – Providing learners with opportunities to develop true understanding of concepts through higher-order thinking, inquiry learning and being able to self-monitor their thinking.
- Developmental – The need for schooling to fit its activities to the developmental level of students.
- Constructivist – Where students understand the power of creating and reinventing their own cognitive path.
- Challenging – The commitment to providing learners with genuine challenges and choices, and facilitating their development as responsible learners.
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