Page 62 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

instead of striving for the longest possible schooling and the highest
degrees.
The building block of employability thus replaces the social standard
or norm. Now, instead of the student deriving individuality from the
social norm (how one relates to the norm), it is about the student’s
learning outcomes which they have actually attained that determine
their performance level. The personhood of the learner - or (even bet-
ter) their identity as a person - is not really shown in a degree, but in
what the learner actually knows and can do. It is about accumula-
tion, and thus always about individual results rather than a normal
development and (normalised) attainment of targets or goals. This is
2
why an instrument like the portfolio is of central importance in this
architecture: it gives a snapshot of accumulated competencies. In this
respect, it is a representation of what somebody ‘carries in his pocket’
or what is somebody’s ‘worth’ in light of their employability. The port-
folio shows the learner as a learner, as a profile. Making a curriculum
vitae implies that somebody thinks about their school and job career
in a chronological order, which is usually underlined by referring to
degrees and to when and through which institution the graduation
took place. A portfolio, in contrast, forces somebody to profile them-
selves in the present, based on the competencies they have in hand,
contouring their personal profile of what competencies are applicable
and can be put to use in order to perform. In general, this means that
the learner who shows themself through a profile is by the same ges-
ture also publicly recognisable. This is from a different order than a
student file, which is made by experts in an educational institution to
note when something out of the ordinary or ‘abnormal’ happens and
which has restricted access.
Whilst young people in the modern educational institution leave the
family and pass through the curriculum as a student, people as learn-
ers tread one or more learning environments. Within those learning
environments they follow learning paths and modules in which they
find support, in order to reach predefined learning outcomes to guar-
antee (or at least enhance) employability. The societal expectations of

2 The word is derived from the Italian portafoglio, which is a case for carrying loose
sheets. We also recognise the word in the French word portefeuille, which is a wallet.
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