Page 78 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

cation that the outcomes are realised or not. Similarly, think of the
learner that continuously needs feedback and that has to deal with
only a numeric pat on the back; a grade hardly gives feedback. But also,
inversely, the student who thinks that every exam includes a normalis-
ing judgment, will undoubtedly have difficulties with the abundance of
formative assessments that make up a learning environment. It is to be
expected that the learner wants their personage to be done justice to,
with the expectation that there is no social norm which can or should
be applied, but that they should receive ‘custom’ treatment. The logical
consequence is that, from the viewpoint of the learner, the enforcement
of uniform rules or working with a norm can always be criticised as a
‘personal injustice’: ‘I can or don’t want to follow this rule because it
doesn’t meet my personal needs’ or ‘this offer is adapted to an abstract
idea of a normal student and does injustice to my personal needs’.
This is a logical reaction because a rule or a norm is (by definition) not
directed towards a singular person. Rules and norms function only
because they make abstraction from differences among individuals and
always do injustice to the unique person. Consequently, in a learning
environment, any educational administration which works on the basis
of uniform rules is under pressure. They will most likely be forced to
change in order to offer personalised services. Educational regulation,
as well, is not self-evident in the architecture of the learning environ-
ment, unless it is the rule to inventory and formalise all exceptions.
This brings us to asking how we can relate to these new (and old)
power configurations. This is the focus of the third chapter.

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