Page 108 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

the person of the students as their starting or seeing the student as a
means to achieve other ends?

Exploratory check of forms of personalisation
We believe that a (school-)pedagogical perspective is often missing
in the debate on ‘student-centrism’. The debate is mostly about opti-
mising employability or about making the learning process more effi-
cient and more effective. The debate is less often appraised in light of
the school: can all variances of student-centrism be reconciled with
scholastic forms of learning? How does student-centrism challenge
scholastic learning which seeks to materialise the assumptions of free-
dom, equality, and formation? The following check is not exhaustive
or final, and is quite abstract and analytical, but hopefully it provides
an indication of the kind of challenges that the school has to face when
confronted with personalisation.

Year class system and personal learning pathways

In schools, education and learning are to be organised, and there are
naturally numerous principles and models of organisation. The archi-
tecture of the educational institution uses the system of year groups
(mostly alongside grades, school types, and specialisations). Students
are grouped in a class, based on their age and according to the subject
matter which should be processed during the period of one school
year (also see Doornbos, 1969). The subject matter and contents are
uniform, and this is usually also the case for the teaching method, even
though this is not necessary (the teacher can for instance differentiate
among students within the class group). The most common form of
differentiation is repeating a year (or skipping a year). One assumption
of this system is that age coincides with the somewhat-equal capac-
ity or maturity of students to process all subject matter at more or
less the same speed. The critique on this system is often directed at
the questionable effectiveness of school year repetition, and at the
assumption that every student of the same age has the same learning
speed. Inversely, the completely personalised learning environment
starts from personal differences in capacity, differences in learning

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