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Students taking responsibility for their own learning process

'Journal club: Situated knowledges, situated learning, situated teaching’

The second journal club on Thursday 18 January was dedicated to discussing Donna Haraway’s 1988 article on situated knowledges. It points out that (scientific) knowledge is always developed from a certain perspective, angle, and/or standpoint, and within a certain context. For our theme and team, these points are extremely important and relevant as teaching is a situated practice with lots of perspectives – e.g. students, teachers, course coordinator, program leader – and indeed a specific context – e.g. country, university, faculty/school/department, program, physical setting, etc.

If we see and understand the learning by our students as situated learning, then it goes without saying that the community of fellow students and university teachers is much more than the pedagogical setting; the community IS the curriculum. And that gives this community, both teachers and students, a huge responsibility to address, share, and discuss,  the ‘right’ (that is: meaningful, relevant, impactful, etc) learning content, didactics and pedagogies, and learning materials. 

We observe that the integration of (talking about) those various perspectives and contexts is lacking too often, or is only given a very limited amount of time. That brought us to several recommendations for our Taking Responsibility program:

  • When we invite university teachers and/or students to share their experiences on taking responsibility, we should invite them explicitly to give attention to their perspective and context.
  • In the development of our intended Pedagogical Pattern Language, we should make room in the pattern descriptions for perspectives, contexts, and issues of transferability.
  • We should realize that taking responsibility for their learning could mean completely different things for different students and teachers.
  • We should welcome mixed-methods innovation and research approaches in our program.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 

Photo by Matias North on Unsplash