From School Choice to Student Voice - development of teaching programmes based on student interests

School Administrator, May, 2001 by Paul E. Heckman, Viki L. Montera

The idea of a walk in the neighborhood may be fun and interesting, but mass marketing and production ideas raise questions about learning in this kind of situation. What standard output or outcome will students have after an experience like the one we have just described? What will students have achieved and learned that will be like what every other student in every other classroom in Tucson or throughout the United States has learned and achieved?

Standard inputs, throughputs and outputs have no place in promoting customized activities and learning. As the late Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon stated: "... the meaning of 'knowing' [learning] has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it. More than ever, the sheer magnitude of human knowledge renders its coverage by education an impossibility. Rather the goal of education is better conceived as helping students develop the intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire knowledge that allows people to think productively about history, science, technology, social phenomena, mathematics, and the arts."

The children involved in the example above had learned and therefore knew about the features of plants and other details of vegetables that they were describing. They had learned these particular features of plants and their world in their everyday lives in interactions with adults and children with whom they live and play.

This out-of-school learning and knowledge is significant in light of the fact that the textbook to which we referred earlier asked children to know and therefore learn only three facts about plants: plants need sun, water and soil to grow. According to the textbook, these facts were to be learned by all of the students in ways prescribed by the textbook.

The children, however, already knew a lot of different features about plants. Children can know and learn much more from their total set of experiences in and out of school. Focusing on a narrow set of particular curriculum facts to be learned in school may be contributing to children's underachievement.

From our example, it is also evident why Simon, an American economist, suggests that inert facts are less important than are the tools and strategies of learning and knowing. The children came to know these things because they used their minds' tools and their own strategies of figuring out how things work in the world with the support of significant others.

A niche market embraces the unique knowledge of individuals and their interests and promotes various ways for children to know what they know and learn more about what they already know.

Everyday Occurences

The reliance on borrowed ideas from mass production and manufacturing systems has guided public education and its reform for too long. Under these standardized conditions, wherever a student goes to school, the expectation is that each and every student will achieve the very same things that any other student achieves and learns. Such a belief and an assumption make the development of niche and customized classroom work difficult, if not impossible.