Volume 22 Issue: 13

12 July 2012

Battle for the 21st century classroom

EDUCATION
Dean Ashenden
The classroom one teacher, one group of students, usually of
the same age, one rectangular space, door closed is the great
survivor of schooling. It is now as it has been for two or three
centuries the main arena of the encounter between teacher and
taught, and the taken-for-granted stem cell of schooling as it
metastised from cottage to global enterprise.
The pre-eminent chronicler of the classroom, United States
historian Larry Cuban, has depicted the history of the classroom as a contest
between teacher-centred and student-centred pedagogies . In the foundational
form of the classroom, rows of desks faced the front where, on a raised platform,
standing before a blackboard, a single adult talked, told, and controlled dozens of
students who sat up straight and listened, recited, copied and remembered their
way through one 30-minute lesson after another.
But this form has long been under assault from progressivism and its
disruptive ideas about how to organise space, students, time and activities to
produce active and creative learning driven by student needs and interests.
The contest between the old and the new, Cuban argues, has been settled
decisively in favour of the established order. As a stroll down any school corridor
will reveal, student-centred teaching and learning have steadily gained ground,
particularly in the earlier years of schooling, but even there it has been absorbed
into a hybridised but clearly teacher-dominated classroom order.
There is little evidence to suggest that things have played out differently in
Australia. Here as in the United States a crazy-brave rebellion in the 1970s in
support of the open classroom and its team-taught, flexibly-grouped,
activity-based learning was effortlessly defeated. A former colleague conducted a
national evaluation of the open classroom, and could tell some very funny stories
about the ingenuity with which teachers used pot plants, book-cases, office
partitions, stacks of cartons, anything to turn open classrooms back into closed
ones.
Twenty years later another incursion came from a different direction but
suffered the same fate. In the early 1990s the National Project on the Quality of
Teaching and Learning (NPQTL) set out to encourage different ways of organising
the work of students and teachers, but soon disappeared without trace. The
classroom is a jealous god.
But does it have another century or two left in it? The classroom is facing a
combination of pressures which might force it to cede more ground, perhaps even
lose its place as the dominant life form, in at least some areas of schooling.
2012 EurekaStreet.com.au

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