Learner Centred Approach for Global Leadership in Management Education

Background

The use of learner centre approach also referred to as student centred approach in management education is emphasized time and again. This approach for learning and teaching brings optimism and opportunity for both learners and educators in education. It liberates both the teacher and the student in the scholarly enterprise by removing traditional boundaries and restrictions to knowledge. However, it also challenges us to consider the best possible approach and the adoption of it so that our students and, more fundamentally, our actions as educators in the process of exploiting these approaches for pedagogical advantage. The term ‘learner centred approach’ is used extensively throughout the educational world; it is the latest in an assortment of terms that have been used to describe the how management education can be made more effective, sustainable and facilitate in creating future leaders. Perhaps by defining - albeit very rapidly - a number of concepts we will be able to outline our position as regards certain recent debates within the field of learning theories. In fact, the very notion of “student/learner-centred learning”, which has enjoyed so much success and which has been seen as one of the central tenets in educational reforms (American Psychological Association, 1997), remains a complex construct and the outcome of various compromises and were we to take all fourteen of the guiding principles of this approach together it would be virtually impossible to be faithful to them all. Rather than highlight, therefore, a homogenous perspective, as that described by Bonk & Cunningham (1998) within a sociocultural or constructivist-social vision, we would prefer to focus on a commitment to the very conception of education: not so much for its novelty, which when all is said and done is perhaps not so innovative, but rather for its efforts to make a break with educational practices based solely on the perspective of the teacher. Indeed, “centring” the approach on the person that has to learn is what education should have always sought to achieve.