Learning Without Limits
Susan Hart, Annabelle Dixon, Mary Jane Drummond & Donald McIntyre
Pub. Open University Press, 2004
Reviewer: Barry Hymer, Director, Still Thinking UK Ltd
Some books have the capacity to affect educational practice by encouraging readers to try out new classroom activities and techniques and to explore the impact of these on students’ learning. These books are relatively numerous. A minority of books, however, transcends this level of innovation: they have the capacity to transform practice from the bottom up - by inviting readers to reflect on their own fundamental educational values and principles, and to act in the direction of them. These books are rarely met with universal approval, as they often challenge existing orders and practices. But their effect can be seismic.
Learning Without Limits is a book for latent revolutionaries, for those educationists who’ve always had a dim sense that there’s something rotten in the state of teaching-by-ability, but who have never quite been able to articulate the grounds for their discomfort - partly because they’ve not even been aware that there might be an alternative to the ability-paradigm (which includes not just the practices associated with streaming or setting or banding - but to mixed-ability teaching too). It’s the very concept of ‘ability’, mixed or otherwise, which they challenge - suggesting that in the assumptions we build around the concept, we can inadvertently act against the best interests of children - narrowing their educational opportunities and fostering unhelpful attitudes and learning dispositions. Their reservations are based not on well-meaning, bleeding-heart misinterpretations of Dewey or Bruner or Gould, but on the reality of teachers’ and researchers’ experiences. In a powerful chapter, What’s Wrong with Ability Labelling? , the authors undertake an authoritative tour of the research literature, and en passant expose many educational paradoxes which affect all learners, including ‘the bright’ and ‘gifted’: - e.g. Nel Keddie’s 1970s research which concluded that it is the failure of high-ability pupils to question what they are taught in schools that contributes to their educational achievement - with all the longer-term implications that has for many young people. This chapter chimes well with the conclusions of researchers such as Carol Dweck - e.g. that positive labelling (‘gifted’) is not the answer to negative labelling (‘thick’) - as both teach children that their underlying intelligence can be readily judged by their performance, and that this can in turn lead to the locating of achievement in unhelpful, extrinsic forms.
Hart et al.’s contribution to theory is grounded in the practice and reflections of nine teachers, reflecting all key stages, geographical and catchment areas and many different subject disciplines, who have worked not from a theoretically-derived model, but from core educational values and deep reflections on their own individual practice, as they attempt to reconcile their own values with the apparent negation of these values in classroom practice. These reflections come close, therefore, to the formulation of nine “living educational theories” (Whitehead, 1993, 2006), but the authors then proceed in the final chapters to attempt a synthesis of these teachers’ various practices, experiences, beliefs and reflections. The synthesis coalesces around the core concept of ‘transformability’ - a rejection of ability-determinism and the embrace of teachers’ potential for transforming children’s capacity to learn. Implications for practice are identified and explored.
This book numbers less than 300 pages, but it is a big book. It deserves the widest
GEI Vol 21 Nos 2/3
