Colliding collaboration in student-centred learning in higher education

Abstract

The paper deals with the assumption that student-centred learning enhances students’ sense of involvement and facilitates a recontextualization of their experiences into valid knowledge in an academic context. Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing of knowledge and his distinctions between horizontal and vertical knowledge codes are used to explore these assumptions, focusing on the regulation of educational knowledge in one case of student-centred learning. Based on the results, we problematize the assumption that student-centred learning enhances students’ sense of involvement and gives them power and control over the knowledge production. We also problematize the assumption that student-centred learning in higher education facilitates a recontextualization of students’ former experiences, for example, connected to work practice. The horizontal and vertical knowledge codes ultimately did not meet in the project; instead, the two different discourses formed competing and colliding frameworks.