Page 76 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

Hopefully this sketch also shows that making the person of the student
the cornerstone does not simply imply that the student is liberated from
the organisational structures which define them, or that they appear
in their authentic singularity (at last). Instead, another organisational
structure has replaced the former (i.e. the institution). In the architec-
ture of the learning environment, the student is of course no longer
categorised on the basis of a norm and is thus free from processes of
normalisation. But the organisation of the learning environment has
new systems and techniques, and aiming for actual employable learn-
ing outcomes now takes up office. The figure of the ‘institutional’ stu-
dent is replaced by the figure of the ‘profiled’ learner. The personage of
the learner should not be equalled to the student who has at last been
liberated from the shackles of normality and can now expose their true,
authentic self. It is precisely the new techniques and procedures of
profiling, recognition, and feedback which show somebody as a unique
person. For that reason, it is important to be cautious about the stories
of liberation that accompany these recent reforms.
Secondly, we also like to point to some tensions within the new archi-
tecture, thus within the learning environment. First and foremost, the
learner - and we mean the learner who has their eye on outcomes and
becomes a learner because of it - is confronted with ambivalence. This
was and is, coincidentally, also the case for normalisation. The norm
allows for somebody to claim individuality for themselves, but at the
same time it means they must expose themselves to surveillance and
the corrective measures of an expert. There is thus, on the one hand,
an individual freedom, but on the other hand, a being at the mercy
of supervision and correction in the name of social order and secu-
rity. This means that normalisation combines a perspective internal to
education (in the interest of the student) with an external, societal per-
spective (to guarantee a normal, social order). Personalisation causes a
similar ambivalence in the learning environment. If you orient yourself
to learning outcomes which you must accumulate yourself, this means
that you see yourself as a person with a unique added value that you
have control over (by learning). But this also means that the value or the
validation of who you are as a person is determined by what is valued
by society (and, for instance, also what is valued in the job market). The
value of competencies is thus decided externally to the learner and the

76