Page 114 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

Lastly, we focus on a few tensions and ambivalences in the architecture
of the personalised learning environment. 8

Personal freedom and radical responsibilisation

Personalisation, first of all, means that the learner takes control of
their own learning process, and that there is support provided which
takes personal needs and desires into account as much as possible.
On the one hand, this means that the freedom of the student is highly
important, but on the other hand, this can also mean that the responsi-
bility for the success and for achieving learning outcomes through the
learning process lays solely in the hands of the student. Inversely, the
personal empowerment of the student means that the responsibility
for possible failure is also in the hands of the student. In other words,
if the person of the student takes central stage, and when there is cus-
tomised support, there is barely anything left outside the personal
world of the learner that can be called upon to explain things that
go wrong. There is no longer an outside; nothing or no one to blame
except for oneself. The question here is how this affects the student.
We can expect that when it does not lead to a complete internalisation
of success or failure, such a radical responsibilisation leads to extreme
reactions where students do try to contest things which go wrong by
any and all means. What remains for them is a ‘battle of procedures’
and calling upon ‘personal injustice’. The ethical-juridical system is
then the last refuge outside oneself to which they can resort. Secondly,
the problem with this situation is also that – by definition - no rule
or law can do justice to ‘the person’ of the student, and schools and
teachers are put in a very difficult position as a consequence. They are
constantly called upon to do justice to every single student as being
‘the Other’, and in staging oneself as the Other, the student can, in
principle, condemn every rule, norm, organisation, or even action, as
a form of personal injustice. The pedagogical relation to the student,
which assumes freedom and equality, can be in conflict here with a
personalised form of the service relation, which is guided by an almost
ethical claim - ‘to do justice to the Other’.

8 For an elaboration, see also: Simons 2018, 2020.
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