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Challenges to the Global Concept of Student-Centered Learning with Special Reference to the United Arab Emirates: ‘Never fail a Nahayan’

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 47; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00131857.2014.901161

1469-5812

Liz Jackson,

Diverse Education Studies and Reforms

AbstractStudent-centered learning has been conceived as a Western export to the East and the developing world in the last few decades. Philosophers of education often associate student-centered learning with frameworks related to meeting the needs of individual pupils: from Deweyan experiential learning, to the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and other social justice orientations. Yet student-centered learning has also become, in the era of neoliberal education, a jingoistic advertisement for practices and ideologies which can be seen to lead to a global devaluation of the educational profession, and the bolstering of the view of the student as a customer. In this article, I want to disentangle these views and explore some limitations of either model of student-centered learning. To add context, I consider education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) today, which provides an extreme example of the risks involved with prioritizing student’s self-identified needs and interests above all else, as in an idealized or exaggerated student-centered concept. I conclude with brief comments on amending the philosophical concept of student-centered learning to be useful in diverse contexts today.Keywords: student-centered learningphilosophy of educationoutcomes-based educationneoliberalismUnited Arab EmiratesFreire AcknowledgementThanks to Andrew Gardner from the University of Hong Kong for research assistance and to Felipe Delfim de Saavedra e Santos for comments on early drafts. Thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.