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Mauritius: Shifting paradigms
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L'Express (Port Louis)
27 November 2007
Posted to the web 27 November 2007
Shardha Sandapen
Port Louis
Paradigms are general ways of looking at or understanding an area. Although it can often seem that there is only one way to understand a particular domain of knowledge, writers such as Kuhn (1962) have emphasized that paradigms often change radically over time.
In the particular field of education and psychology, earlier paradigms of learning saw the child as relatively passive, simply absorbing information transmitted by a didacticteacher. These perspectives fitted well with the current stress on the principle of conditioning at that time, which took a very mechanistic approach to the managing of learning. According to this, the teacher was to deliver a standard curriculum and to evaluate stable underlying differences between children.
The most popular general paradigm at present is undoubtedly the cognitive one. This emphasises that development in school is active in constructing new knowledge, skills and ways of understanding. This perspective is largely derived from the original ideas of Piaget, although there have been many substantial revisions of his approach. In particular, writers such as Wood (1998) have emphasised the social nature of this learning process, with knowledge developing as a "joint construction" of understanding by the learner and more expert members of his or her culture.
However, a number of alternative perspectives now question the fundamental underlying premises of psychology and educational knowledge. Based on post modernistic ideas, they propose that the classical scientific (modernistic) approach of logical investigation using evidence, often referred to as "positivism", is deeply flawed and outdated. The rationale for this is based on arguments generated by philosophers such as Foucault (1978) that knowledge and understanding are essentially arbitrary and socially constructed. From this perspective, scientific concepts such as intelligence can be seen as functioning to legitimise the status and power of psychology in society. Language concepts and the ways in which they are used (referred to as discourses) also demonstrate the way in which such processes operate. For example, an investigation by Davies (1989) describes the characteristic linguistic images and metaphors in fairy stories, for example, with knights rescuing damsels in distress. Davies argues that it is through such experiences that young children learn the key, socially defined constructs about what is male or female in society.Shifting paradigms in the field of education certainly impact on the role of the teacher who is now seen as a facilitator of learning, by generating appropriate experiences and closely monitoring a child's changing attainment and needs.
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(Reference: Martyn Long, 2000, 1st Ed., The Psychology of Education, USA and Canada, RoutledgeFalmer)
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