From student-centred learning (SCL) to school as learning community (SLC)? Democracy, (neo)liberalism, and ‘listening’ to others

Abstract

ABSTRACT The spread of neoliberal policies across East Asia in the mid-1990s generated a counter-movement among East Asian scholars and practitioners centred on the ‘School as Learning Community’ (SLC). Today, thousands of schools across the region have joined the movement, spreading outward from Japan to Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Herein we review the philosophy and practice of SLC, highlighting how it replaces the independent individuals posited by Western liberalism – as foregrounded in both student-centred learning (SCL) and neoliberal accumulation of knowledge/skills – with the themes of interdependence, relationality, and ‘listening’, in the sublime Deweyan sense. Given that SLC has remained virtually invisible within the English-speaking research literature, it remains difficult to imagine practical pedagogical alternatives to liberalism and neoliberalism. However, SLC helps resuscitate the Anglo-American research imagination by providing an actual example of educational practice predicated on a different onto-epistemic basis. In analysing SLC we also gain a better sense of how philosophies of interdependence and relationality can be concretely operationalised in actual school settings, if we can somehow learn to ‘listen’ to East Asia.