Page 115 - Looking_after_school

3. Touchstones: pedagogical articulations

Personal matters and/in permanent visibility

In the architecture of the personal learning environment, personal
affairs are constantly taken into account. After all, every personal or
individual difference can matter. But this also implies that a difference
only matters when, and in so far as, it is monitored, documented, and
made visible. This constant visibility is often the price that the student
pays in order to be treated as a person. We are coming very close to the
original meaning of the word ‘person’, which forms the backbone of
the Latin ‘persona’ and refers to the mask or to the personage on the
stage. This person is, in other words, the public or virtual side of some-
one. What this clarifies, is that someone must want to get on stage and
play a part to be recognised and acknowledged as a person; a profile is
needed. This means concretely that learners are constantly asked to
visualise and verbalise their personal characteristics, their own feel-
ings and expectations, and their own situation. This also means that
there must always be a stage or a platform for students on which their
personal voice can be heard and their personal performance can be
seen. Or, in absence of which, students – in a less or more radical way
- can create or demand their own stage or claim attention for their
person in another way. The ambivalence is this: personalised educa-
tion wants to do justice to the person of the student, but in the end,
risks only considering the roles, the characters, that students take on
or must play in order to be audible and visible. The risk is also that
students are addressed in such a way that they (have to) behave as
performing actors and that they put all the attention from the school
and the teacher on their own role or profile.

Personalised feedback and learned helplessness

The architecture of the learning environment is characterised by per-
manent feedback loops, and this feedback continuously steers and
supports the learning process. As said earlier, according to Wiener
(1950/1989), applause is the most basic form of feedback. The risk is
that the applause eventually determines who you are as a person or a
student, a risk which is far from imaginary when the personalised stu-
dent actually plays a part and has to perform. This means, concretely,
that students become totally depended on feedback and would be

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