From student-centred learning (SCL) to school as learning community (SLC)? Democracy, (neo)liberalism, and ‘listening’ to others

ABSTRACT

The spread of neoliberal policies across East Asia in the mid-1990s generated a counter-movement among East Asian scholars and practitioners centred on the ‘School as Learning Community’ (SLC). Today, thousands of schools across the region have joined the movement, spreading outward from Japan to Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Herein we review the philosophy and practice of SLC, highlighting how it replaces the independent individuals posited by Western liberalism – as foregrounded in both student-centred learning (SCL) and neoliberal accumulation of knowledge/skills – with the themes of interdependence, relationality, and ‘listening’, in the sublime Deweyan sense. Given that SLC has remained virtually invisible within the English-speaking research literature, it remains difficult to imagine practical pedagogical alternatives to liberalism and neoliberalism. However, SLC helps resuscitate the Anglo-American research imagination by providing an actual example of educational practice predicated on a different onto-epistemic basis. In analysing SLC we also gain a better sense of how philosophies of interdependence and relationality can be concretely operationalised in actual school settings, if we can somehow learn to ‘listen’ to East Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• neoliberalism
• lesson study
• relations/relationality
• interdependence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 One reviewer of our piece pointed out that in some OECD materials outlining ‘scenarios for the future of schooling’, there is mention of ‘School as Learning Hubs’ (OECD 2020). In some aspects, this scenario is convergent with SLC. Future research may wish to bring these into dialogue, and potentially pose SLC as one version of a ‘learning hub’ approach. Still, we feel that differences remain in how much emphasis is placed on ‘personalized’ (read: individualised) pathways within these OECD ‘Learning Hubs’, which contrasts heavily with the relational/interdependent focus of SLC. More broadly, we wonder how far the OECD would be willing to take up SLC, in that it explicitly opposes neo-liberal logics and instrumentalization to external goals, an approach that has been at the centre of OECD educational work for the past decade (e.g., PISA, see Komatsu and Rappleye 2017b).

2 See Ames (2011, 169–171) for a discussion of the Confucian sources. Here it is crucial to recognise that Japan's name for itself is he (和), as found in washoku (和食) and wafu (和風), and the reference to ‘attunement’ is found in the very first line of Japan's Seventeen Article Constitution (604BC). Interestingly, when Japan's scholars translated the term ‘republic’ into sinographs, they used the term ‘mutual attunement’ (Japanese: kyowakoku, Chinese: goongheguo, 共和国). The connections between sound, attunement, participation and the modern polity in East Asia is the future of our forthcoming work (Rappleye and Komatsu forthcoming-a).

3 Here we have space only to offer an abbreviated historical account, but have detailed this history elsewhere (Rappleye and Komatsu forthcoming-b).

4 Dewey openly criticised Kilpatrick on this point (see Komatsu and Rappleye 2017a).

5 Space does not fuller analysis of this in terms of borrowing/transfer, but it would underscore existing work by Schriewer (2003), Steiner-Khamsi (2000), and Rappleye (2012) that suggests that behind borrowing and transfer often stand long-standing cultural and/or historical agendas.