Pedagogy - OUR THINKING

EDUCATIONAL PROCESSES

The dominant practices at most academic institutions portray an underlying acceptance that learning is a process of accumulation of certain packaged bodies of information, delivered in a scripted sequence. Republic Polytechnic (RP) takes quite a different stand.

Learning at the polytechnic is viewed as an initiation to a life of value and meaning in socio-economic terms. The way this needed learning is designed to happen is natural, complex and evolutionary. A person’s knowledge and skills are thereby an emergent outcome, both in explicit and tacit forms, triggered by new experiences. This development necessarily happens on the background of learner’s own prior knowledge, and within frameworks of accessible established knowledge. What the learner knows gets modified and realigned by each engagement and experience, as a consequence of interactions that enable a learner to make better sense of the world around them.

At RP, what happens in the classroom is facilitation of learning in classrooms instead of teaching. Specially designed scaffolds are adopted to foster that learning. We believe that neither trying to engineer learning in a mechanical scripted sense nor hoping that learning can take its course entirely freely would yield satisfactory outcomes. Moreover, the module grades recorded on the academic transcript need to carry a meaning in socio-economic settings in the long term, and therefore should be determined by multiple assessments made over a period, of process skills and subject understanding, instead of dominantly by an examination at the end of each academic term. 

LEARNING AT REPUBLIC POLYTECHNIC

The approach at RP is to get students to engage in activities in teams, and learn by attempting to respond to ‘problems’ posed, under the guidance of a facilitator in an environment with ‘liberating controls’. The problem trigger is intentionally designed for the purpose by an ‘educational architect’. The engagement invariably involves negotiations, debates and interpretations, as a collective exercise among peers and the facilitator, whereby the viable are retained and the unlikely discarded, in order to make sense at a personal as well as a community level. The presence of established prior art, and accompanying justifications, are duly respected in this process. No two students are expected to learn either the exact same thing or in the exact same way although all involved in a single physical setting would naturally advance in a co-evolutionary process.

We believe that this is the way people learn throughout their lives, inclusive of when shopping or driving a car, or conducting a scientific research activity, or engineering a physical contraption. Any strangeness felt about RP’s unique approach is quite likely due to unquestioned acceptance of practices in conventional schools, where actions taken suggest an expectation that students should accept a specific sets of ‘truths’, practices and values, wherein (a) those presumed truths, practices and values are supposed to have a validity that is external to both the teacher and the learner, and therefore beyond question, (b) the student is to become capable of reciting those truths and demonstrate those practices by a private endeavour of acquisition, processing and storing, and (c) the ability to recite, or mechanically lay in a pre-established pattern, stored knowledge during an examination with a pre-arranged form and conducted at a pre-arranged time, is taken as a measure of the educational achievement of a student.

In contrast, within the academic framework at RP any attempt to force a student to unconditionally accept a set of presumed truths, practices or values, on the basis of an external validity, is considered unethical and therefore objectionable. Promoted are experimentation, reasoning and negotiation, in viable ways thought of as the best possible under the conditions by the educational activity designers at the respective points in time.