Enquiry vs didactic, teacher lead vs student lead, pedagogy vs andragogy, individual vs collaborative, knowledge vs skills so may dichotomies to choose from and so few of them real. Life and learning are so full of dichotomies and yet very few of them stand up to close analysis. In reality, learning is so much more subtle with beautiful shades of grey (and many more than 50 I would guess). Unfortunately, it makes for a good argument to say that enquiry based learning is better than expertly taught content, that collaborative work is superior to learners learning alone and that knowledge is more important than skills, so that is what fuels the education debate.
With a little common sense and a realisation that life and learning is always a blend, we can avoid these pointlessly subjective debates and focus on what is important; designing learning that gets the best out of learners. Indeed, we should actively take on the dichotomies and ensure that some of the learning that we design for our learners is enquiry based and that some of it is expertly driven, that sometimes we have quiet individual learning and that this experience is blended with active and collaborative learning, that sometimes we use the newest technologies available to us, and sometime we use a piece of chalk and a stick. My friend Tom did a great keynote at Edutech looking at this polarisation and the need to enjoy and celebrate the complexity, not push it into a corner.
Learning and designing learning are about making the best choices for the learners in front of us and personalising a blended approach to experiences that help build understanding. Teaching for effective learning is in itself a blend of science and art, knowledge and skills, knowing when to speak up and drive learning and when to sit back and light the fire of curiosity. If we only deal with dichotomies then we are missing the point. So maybe we should talk less about pedagogy and the illusions of polarised dichotomies and more about learning design and designing the best experiences for the those who are on the learning journey with us.
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