Student-Centered Learning : Subversive Teachers and Standardized Worlds

Abstract

The essays in this volume that pay tribute to an outstanding educator, Delsworth Harnish from McMaster University deal with the problems and prospects of fostering student-centred learning in a standards-based world through subversive teaching. The essays are riffs on a theme mooted by Postman and Weingartner in their now classic book “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” The contributions from retired professors, senior educators to younger active instructors, educational researchers, medical and graduate students who provide a broad spectrum of opinions on those contentious issues. Though much has changed since the heady sixties and the tensions of the Vietnam War when the book was published, much abides. The enemies within and without have taken newer guise, but the tensions remain—the desires of teachers to spark individuality and the demands of society to straitjacket them in the guise of promoting efficiency.