Learner-Centered Pedagogy

Principles and Practice

Kevin Michael Klipfel, Dani Brecher Cook

• Publisher: ALA Editions
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780838915578
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838915745
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Today's emphasis on metrics and personalization make evidence-based instruction an imperative. In this practice-based handbook, the authors draw on the research of the humanistic psychologist and educator Carl Rogers to present an empathetic approach to information literacy sessions, reference service, and outreach.  With an eye on everyday library work, they offer concrete, empirically-based strategies to connect with learners at all levels. Offering plentiful examples of pedagogy in action, this book covers:

• 6 cognitive principles for organizing information literacy instruction, with sample worksheets and organization tools for instruction planning;
• how to establish rapport and kindle learners' motivation;
• tactics for transcending "cite 5 sources" and other uninspiring research assignments;
• educational evidence debunking the mythical perception that because students are skilled at computers and mobile technology, they already know how to do research;
• questions to keep in mind for inspiring autonomous learning;
• the power of story, as described by Joan Didion, Brené Brown's Ted Talk, and educational psychology research;
• the science behind information overload; and
• a balanced framework for evaluating specific educational technology tools.

Fusing theory with practice, this handbook is a valuable resource to help every practitioner connect with learners more effectively.

1

WHAT IS LEARNER-CENTERED PEDAGOGY?

IN THIS CHAPTER, WE

• • create a working definition of learner-centered pedagogy, based centrally on the work of Carl Rogers.
• • explore how learner-centered pedagogy applies to contemporary conceptions of librarianship.
• • reframe information literacy as an explicitly learner-centered concept.

Defining Learner-Centered Pedagogy

Aside from a few tough cases, you would be hard-pressed to find many educators who don’t in some sense identify as learner-centered. Most of us who work in education—whether as teachers, professors, or librarians—pride ourselves on putting students first and aim to make pedagogical choices with the best interests of our learners in mind. Nevertheless, when tasked with articulating the essence of the learner-centered approach, even the most well-intentioned among us may have a hard time clearly expressing what being learner-centered actually means, in a comprehensive sense. So we begin this book by doing just that.

Often, in attempting to define a learner-centered approach, we find ourselves pointing to individual practices or examples of teaching that seem particularly learner-centered. For example, when leading a discussion forum at the 2014 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, Kevin invited the librarians in attendance to share what learner-centered reference librarianship meant to them. The librarians shared strategies that certainly seemed to fit the bill. Many librarians agreed, for example, that helping a student in an academic library conduct research on a topic that interests her is learner-centered, but lecturing students like a “sage on the stage” seems less so. In fact, this group of librarians responding off-the-cuff was pretty intuitively hip to many of the common themes more formally addressed by learner-centered pedagogues within the academic literature. For example, teaching and learning expert Terry Doyle defines learner-centered pedagogy more or less as any practices that involve getting “students to do most of the learning work.”1 Doyle draws this conclusion from contemporary learning sciences research showing that students tend to learn best when their minds are actively engaged, rather than when their teachers are doing most of the talking (and thinking). So the librarians at ALA were absolutely correct: in many learner-centered models of instruction, teachers (and librarians) are positioned as facilitators or guides for learning, rather than pontificating lecturers straight out of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

But though these specific responses strike us as good ones, we want to be careful to avoid concluding that learner-centered pedagogy is simply a set of best practices for the classroom, whether that includes asking students to write about what they are interested in, refraining from being overly authoritarian in lectures, or any of dozens of other strategies that place students at the center of the educational process. These answers are correct as far as they go, but in defining learner-centered pedagogy at the outset of this book, we want to construct a deep, transferable understanding of the concept that takes us beyond a specific strategy to perform or avoid.

In our view, being a learner-centered librarian is about much more than using a particular strategy or gimmick. This book presents learner-centered pedagogy as a way of looking at the world and how we connect to other human beings that has deep implications for the way we practice as teachers and librarians. Our view, simply stated, is that who we are as people matters. Our conception of learner-centered pedagogy encourages library educators to encounter the learner as an individual with personal interests, preferences, and motivations, and a uniquely human set of cognitive capacities. We must seek to understand who our learners are, in a deep psychological sense, before we can understand how best to assist them in the research process. It is precisely this process of building connection with our students that, in a learner-centered scenario, situates the teacher as a facilitator for learning rather than an “expert,” the more traditional, hierarchical role. Understanding our learners as human beings, ones with enormously complex cognitive, psychological, and emotional needs—and the consequences this understanding has for our practice as librarians—is therefore the overarching aim of this book.

In many ways, we follow in the footsteps of a number of scholars who have approached the practice of teaching through a learner-centered lens. Some of our thinking can be specifically tracked to when learner-centered pedagogy officially emerged as a critical concept for K–12 educators in the early 1990s. At the beginning of the decade, the American Psychological Association appointed a task force to bring together research from psychology, education, and related fields to suggest guiding principles for evidence-based teaching. The resulting report, Learner-Centered Psychological Principles: Guidelines for School Design and Reform, began an ongoing conversation among educational practitioners about applying best practices from the literature to the classroom, with theoretical roots going back to creative thinkers such as John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, and Carl Rogers.2 This book certainly is rooted in the evidence-based tradition of psychology, cognitive science, and education, but our core understanding of learner-centered pedagogy as a deeply humanistic concept is unique among the current learner-centered literature. Since we owe this understanding in large part to our reading of some key humanistic texts, we take a brief tour of the major works that inform this approach and explain why this approach is so relevant to library educators today.

Carl Rogers and the Importance of Empathy

The view of learner-centered pedagogy in this book owes its greatest debt to the humanistic tradition in psychology and education, and we’re particularly indebted to the “person-centered” approach of the psychotherapist and philosopher of education Carl Rogers. One of the most influential figures in the Humanistic Psychology movement of the 1960s, Rogers initially rose to prominence in the world of counseling and psychotherapy, not in the world of education. He made his name by defending the seemingly simple belief that human connection is at the heart of psychology. Rogers believed that, given the right conditions, everyone can reach their true potential as human beings, just like a plant given the appropriate amount of water and sunlight will naturally grow and flourish. He hypothesized that human beings have an innate desire to express themselves, an intrinsic need to connect in positive ways with others, and a desire to actualize themselves in the world in a constructive manner. Things go awry, however, when in the process of developing into adults, we receive messages and internalize values that run counter to our understanding of ourselves as individuals. Many of our dominant psychological strategies for raising children, Rogers thought, are the psychological equivalent of systematically pouring a quart of motor oil onto a baby avocado plant and expecting it to grow into a healthy, fruit-bearing tree.

That Rogers’s views may now strike us as fairly commonplace only demonstrates how deeply the humanistic mindset has become ingrained in our current cultural understanding of human behavior.3 In the ’60s, Rogers’s theories were considered quite radical since they fundamentally challenged the dominant theory and practice of psychotherapy of the day, Freudian psychoanalysis. For the practicing Freudian, the therapeutic process was an impersonal one; it was clinical and inegalitarian in the same way that many contemporary encounters with physicians still tend to be.

For example, let’s imagine that you have a pain in your ear so you make an appointment with your doctor. It would not be unusual for the doctor to enter the examination room with a cursory greeting, move directly to looking in your ear, say something along the lines of, “Yup, you have an ear infection,” and proceed to typing out a prescription before quickly exiting the room. This process, at its core, requires no meaningful relationship building or personal connection between physician and patient; it simply involves an individual with a general sense that he might be sick consulting with an expert who employs her superior understanding and training to effect a cure.4

In a similar manner, in traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, a psychological expert listens to a troubled person with the goal of objectively understanding the individual’s difficulties. The psychoanalyst then applies his vast psychological knowledge to interpret the patient’s past, thereby “curing” her of suffering. The psychoanalyst’s expertise is at the core of the interaction, with his superior knowledge leading to a cure for the individual’s distress. And, at least on the surface, this seems to make an awful lot of sense. After all, why go see a therapist if not for the therapist’s superior psychological knowledge?

Rogers’s controversial response, which he outlined in his seminal 1957 paper, “The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Therapeutic Personality Change,” was that the therapist’s psychological knowledge and authority have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a patient gets better.5 Instead, what actually helps an individual make a constructive personality change that leads to increased happiness is the therapeutic relationship: the connection that the client feels with his therapist, and the degree to which he feels personally understood.

Given this insight, Rogers came to realize that what mattered was not the therapist’s abstract knowledge of psychology, but the ability to accept patients for themselves. If the primary cause of human suffering is an individual’s feelings of rejection, then it is the psychologist’s job to manifest the opposite attitudes toward the patient. Since many individuals’ emotional pain is due to having “conditions of worth” placed on them by parents or loved ones (e.g., “behave in this way and I will value you; if you don’t, I won’t value you”), the therapist must create relationships with patients so that they feel valued unconditionally (what Rogers calls unconditional positive regard).

A central element of Rogerian therapy then becomes the therapist’s ability to empathize so that the patient feels understood. For this reason, Rogers coined the phrase person-centered therapy for his unique approach to counseling. For the person-centered therapist, an empathic relationship is critical for a person to develop into a healthy individual, with a capacity for autonomy, self-direction, and establishment of genuine and meaningful emotional connections with others. Unlike the Freudian psychoanalyst, the person-centered therapist’s aim is not to diagnose a patient and prescribe a cure. Instead, the person-centered therapist’s goal is to understand the inner world of another person. It is this empathic understanding, when perceived by the patient, that ultimately helps her develop a secure sense of self.

Thus, for the person-centered therapist, What is it like to be this person? is the central question of the therapeutic encounter. Unlike a general medical practitioner, who can offer an objective diagnosis within a few seconds and then walk away, the successful therapist must create real human connection and authentic engagement with individuals to effect growth and personality change. The foundation of this connection is emotional honesty between the patient and therapist, which requires empathy. Empathy—the ability to understand what it is like to be another person from that individual’s point of view—and the ability to accept a person without the desire to change him is a profound facilitator of psychological change. To Rogers, the ideal therapist is one who embodies this empathic mindset toward clients and who practices empathy as a “way of being.” In the post-Rogerian world of therapy, simply bringing psychological expertise to the table is no longer enough, and no longer as important as it once was.

In sum, Rogers thoroughly changed the way that psychologists viewed their work—from a highly clinical endeavor to a helping relationship. For us, though, the most interesting part of Rogers’s work on person-centeredness and empathy is that it extends beyond the therapeutic relationship to other domains, such as education. We explore this development in the next section.

A Humanistic View of Education

One reason that Carl Rogers continues to be an important humanistic thinker is that he explicitly extended his insights from the therapeutic setting into the educational realm, and many of his (at the time, radical) hypotheses about education have proven to be empirically sound. Rogers viewed the counseling-patient relationship in person-centered therapy as a learning one because it involves a change in the patient’s self-understanding, which is a very common definition of learning and one that we discuss in more depth in the next section. Consequently, Rogers saw no reason that the insights into human behavior and motivation he gleaned from counseling should not transfer into a similar context of learning, the classroom setting.

It follows, then, that in Rogers’s view a major part of the educator’s job is to facilitate “significant learning” akin to the existentially meaningful, personal kind of learning that goes on in a productive therapeutic relationship. For Rogers, learning takes place on a continuum of meaning. On one end of the spectrum is learning that has no personal meaning to the student, as in the rote memorization of nonsense syllables. Because there is no concrete or compelling personal reason to remember these things, they tend to be forgotten quickly. Unfortunately, Rogers theorized, most of what is taught in a classroom falls into this category since concepts tend to be introduced without context or existentially relevant connection to the lives of the learners.

On the other end of the Rogerian continuum of meaning lies significant learning, which has both meaning and personal relevance to the learner. Significant learning takes place for the learner if, and only if, the learner attaches some personal me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. What Is Learner-Centered Pedagogy?
• Chapter 2. Curiosity and Learning: The Importance of Authenticity and Autonomy
• Chapter 3. Empathy and the Science of Learning: Lessons from the Cognitive Literature
• Chapter 4. Relationships: The Heart of Learner-Centered Pedagogy
• Chapter 5. Trusting the Process: Cultivating a Growth Mindset
• Chapter 6. The Learner-Centered Technologist
• Conclusion: The Timelessness of Learner-Centered Pedagogy
• Directions for Further Reading
• About the Authors
• Index