Page 41 - Looking_after_school

1. Today's discourse: why should the student be at the center of education?

(differences in) ability of the students to steer their learning process.
This means, to summarise, that education is problematised in so far
as it approaches students as passive receivers and does not discern stu-
dents in terms of learning capacity and other learning characteristics.

Differentiation

Connected to the above, this current discourse of education also
houses a perspective on forms of differentiation (see also Vandecan-
delaere et al., 2016). Differentiation among students can refer to a
number of things, from distinguishing levels of education and the
use of adapted teaching methods to the composition of class groups
(think for instance of forms of streaming and setting). These ideas of
differentiation are usually based on particular aspects such as differ-
ences in learning performance, age, and interests. It centralises the
student because education is adapted to the specific characteristics of
the student. There are also other forms of differentiation based on the
psychology of learning and related didactical perspectives, such as dif-
ferentiation in learning time, levels of objective, method, instruction,
and evaluation (also see Standaert, 2010). The necessity of differentia-
tion is always connected to the problematisation of teaching methods
and educational institutions which assume that there is no difference
between students. In other words: the support, the guidance, and the
organisation of education should take the differences between stu-
dents, or between kinds of students, into account and should adapt
to them.
The current discourse of differentiation typically expands the notion
of differentiation to the point that every student is considered differ-
ent or unique, and claims that education should be based on those
individual differences. In these more radical scenarios, we can no
longer speak of differentiation in a strict sense, but rather of learning
paths that from the onset are already differentiated or individualised.
In their plea for personalisation, Bray and McClaskey (2015) make a
strict distinction between personalisation on the one hand and indi-
vidualisation and differentiation on the other. Differentiation, they
say, is the adaptation of education to the learning needs of different
students: the goals are the same for everyone, but the approach or the

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