Unlearning Pedagogy

"The shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’, while it has served an important function in shifting the focus from the teacher to the learner, does not capture the fullness of the implications of this shift. We have been hearing about the importance of ‘lifelong learning’ for some time now in formal education. If, as Bauman asserts, ‘unlearning’ will be as important to social success in the 21st millennium as learning has been in the 20th millennium, then the habit of ‘lifelong learning’ will need radical re-thinking in terms of the nature and purposes of pedagogical work. Put simply, we will need to see a further shift from sage-on-the-stage and guide-on-the-side to meddler-in-the-middle (McWilliam, 2005)."

Erica McWilliam, Queensland University of Technology