Postsecondary Pedagogy: Moving Students From Performance to Competence

Authors

  • Michael E. Erickson Otero Junior College Author

Abstract

The author reviews research indicating that discipline specialists and novices acquire knowledge differently. He argues that teaching professionals need to help students learn how to learn within general knowledge domains. The developmental/sociocultural perspectives of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Luria, and others, which emphasize the inter/intrapersonal, sociocultural character of learning and the spiraling nature of learning through a "zone of proximal development," serve as a useful guide for assisting postsecondary teaching professionals in attempting to move students from performance to competence. Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation [of mankind] in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance. (Oakeshott, 1991, pp. 490-491)

Published

2024-03-23