The assumptions or ideas about educational practices

The assumptions or ideas about educational practices
There are various assumptions or ideas about educational practices and of the given assumptions, I found a few to be flawed in various ways.
1. “The student’s role is to be a passive recipient of knowledge”
In traditional views of learning, learning is viewed as the transfer of information from knowledgeable sources, such as textbooks, elders or from someone who is more informed, to the passive recipient (Farrell, n.d.). Firstly this shows our heavy reliance on “authorities”. In this case the authorities are the textbooks, elders and the more informed people. Whether these authorities are reliable or not is something that remains questionable. If the student’s role is to be a passive recipient of knowledge and the student receives knowledge that is in fact not the truth, it creates a problem. Which is why if an action (in this case the passing down of knowledge) is likely to affect the student, it is perfectly legitimate for the student to require evidence supporting this “knowledge”. In this case the student would be seen as being an active learner as opposed to a passive recipient of knowledge.
More contemporary views of learning recognize the importance of allowing students to take control of their own learning by participating in active learning, which includes a variety of teaching methods such as small group discussions and teacher driven questioning. (Farrell, n.d.). This is why I find this assumption to be flawed because if active learning is becoming a more common way of learning, then in this case a student’s role is not to be a passive recipient of knowledge as he or she is expected to transfer knowledge through active learning. I believe that a student’s role is to be an active learner because active learning allows students to, according to Jill Beloff Farrell, actively construct not only their own, but others’ knowledge, instead of just being passive recipients of knowledge. If a student is an active learner as opposed to a passive learner, there is more participation and involvement in the students’ own learning as opposed to if the student was a passive recipient of knowledge, which encourages the student to take greater responsibility for his or her own knowledge and education. An ethnographic study done in Japan showed that students who engaged in active learning during lessons increased their knowledge, which shows that a student’s role is not to become a passive recipient of knowledge because he or she actually increases his or her knowledge through active learning.
2. “The students role is to memorize information, then repeat that information in tests and exams”
I find this assumption about educational principles to be flawed because by memorizing information and repeating it in tests and exams, a student becomes a passive recipient of knowledge which takes us back to the passive learner versus the active learner. By memorizing the information, there is an increased chance that the student is not understanding what he or she is learning and there is also a huge chance that the student will never remember this information in the long term, which defeats the whole purpose of learning and attaining knowledge.
We are also exposed to a large amount of information and therefore the strategy for the attention economy is to focus on navigating the information chaos by becoming “engineers of information” through understanding the basic principles of what makes sense or not to therefore quickly adapt to the changing landscape and pick up new information (Rousseau, 2014), and students cannot do this if they memorize information and then repeat it in tests and exams. Therefore the student’s role in this case is to become an engineer of information and to understand the information he or she is being exposed to as opposed to memorizing and repeating the information in tests and exams.
3. “The lecturer’s role is to dispense knowledge”
A traditional view of a lecturer is that of someone who dispenses knowledge. We have already discussed the student’s role as being an active learner as opposed to being a passive recipient of knowledge. If the student’s role is to be an active learner, then the teacher’s role is to therefore facilitate the student’s learning, to provide the conditions for the student to be active in that learning, to prepare and present ideas for the student to consider and to provide guidelines for the student to use in the learning process (Charles Darwin University , 2011). If the lecturer’s role is to dispense knowledge, chances are that this knowledge is coming from another “authority” – an authority in the form of a textbook, past education from another teacher, etc. and again whether these authorities are reliable or not remains questionable. If the lecturer dispenses knowledge from an unreliable source to students, then there is always going to be that increased exposure or continuation of the passing down of wrong knowledge to a greater number of people, which creates a problem. Therefore through active learning (because the action of teaching is likely to affect the student and the lecturer), both the student and the lecturer would have perfectly legitimate reasons to require evidence supporting this “knowledge”, in which case the student and the lecturer are actively involved in looking at which information has the best evidence and argument, which then becomes the reasonable information to believe. In this case they both collaborate to help each other to see the errors in their judgement of what to consider as “knowledge” (Rousseau, et al., 2014). This collaboration would not be possible if the lecturer’s role was only to dispense knowledge.
Also, because of globalisation, we have become exposed to more different people, cultures and religions. Take the University of Cape Town as an example – classes have become more diverse with students from different countries with different views and opinions which can be shared in an active learning environment, therefore exposing the lecturer to different knowledge. In this case, the lecturer is not dispensing knowledge, but rather attaining new or different knowledge. Therefore globalisation can be seen as a contributing factor to a scenario whereby a lecturer’s role has shifted from the “knowledge-giver” to the “knowledge-receiver”.
References
Charles Darwin University , 2011. Lecturer 's Role. [Online]
Available at: http://learnline.cdu.edu.au/units/contestedknowledges/LecturersRole.html
[Accessed 27 February 2014].
Farrell, J. B., n.d. Active Learning: Theories and Research. The Lookstein Centre.
Rousseau, J., 2014. The Politics of Knowledge , Cape Town: s.n.
Rousseau, J., Rousseau, S. & Grainger, M., 2014. Vula. [Online]
Available at: https://vula.uct.ac.za/portal/site/ac15bfee-a136-42c5-b000-6ff723d0b8c9/page/f5bf14c1-4374-4f63-8833-69438d7ef25f
[Accessed 27 February 2014].

References: Charles Darwin University , 2011. Lecturer 's Role. [Online] Available at: http://learnline.cdu.edu.au/units/contestedknowledges/LecturersRole.html [Accessed 27 February 2014]. Farrell, J. B., n.d. Active Learning: Theories and Research. The Lookstein Centre. Rousseau, J., 2014. The Politics of Knowledge , Cape Town: s.n. Rousseau, J., Rousseau, S. & Grainger, M., 2014. Vula. [Online] Available at: https://vula.uct.ac.za/portal/site/ac15bfee-a136-42c5-b000-6ff723d0b8c9/page/f5bf14c1-4374-4f63-8833-69438d7ef25f [Accessed 27 February 2014].