Learning and Teaching: A Philosophical Position

Our position on capability as the key goal of education, which we described in Chapter 1, carries with it some inevitable consequences for learning and teaching, and we examine these in this chapter. We describe the need for learning to be active and task-centred, recognising the individuality of learners. One of the more tricky issues to emerge from these priorities concerns the role of knowledge. If learning is task-focused and individualised, how is this to be reconciled with notions of pre-existing high-status bodies of knowledge? What is technological knowledge and how does it operate as learners undertake tasks? We explore the concept of learners’ ‘need-to-know’ and the pedagogic imperatives that are entailed for teachers seeking to manage it. And this inevitably raises the issue of progression and what it means to become progressively more capable.

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