7 - Listening to and learning from our learners

Summary

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

(Socrates)

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth learning can be taught.

(Oscar Wilde)

Education is what is left when everything that has been taught is forgotten.

(James Bryant)

Introduction

I have a deep and abiding interest in the lives of learners. In fact, during the 1970s and 1980s, I built my teaching practice on learners’ perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and ideas as revealed through their stories. It was through listening to my learners and trying to understand and interpret the learning process from their point of view that I came to embrace the concept of learner-centredness. In a book I wrote back in the 1980s, entitled The Learner-Centred Curriculum, I made the point that in terms of planning, implementation and evaluation, a learnercentred curriculum will contain elements similar to what many good teachers have always done (in fact, the concept of learner-centredness goes back a long way – all the way back to Socrates):

the key difference between learner-centred and traditional curriculum development is that, in the former, the curriculum is a collaborative effort between teachers and learners, since learners are closely involved in the decision-making process regarding the content of the curriculum and how it is taught … This change in orientation has major practical implications for the entire curriculum process, since a negotiated curriculum cannot be introduced and managed in the same way as one which is prescribed by the teacher or teaching institution.

(Nunan 1988: 2)

There is also a long-standing tradition in general education that places the learners and their experiences squarely at the centre of the learning process. This is the experiential learning tradition, which has diverse origins, drawing on Dewey's educational progressivism, Lewin's work in social psychology, Piaget's work in child language development, Kelley's cognitive theory of education and the work of Maslow and Rogers in the field of humanistic psychology.

My favourite contributions to the literature on experiential learning in the field of language education are the book by Legutke and Thomas (1991), and a chapter by Kohonen (1992).