Integrating the Personal with the Public: Values, Virtues and Learning and the Challenges of Assessment

Abstract

Values and dispositions have been described as contested but important aspects of education in the information age which require serious theoretical and empirical attention. The new technologies profoundly challenge educational paradigms devised in modernity and bring to the fore the challenges of integrating the personal and the idiosyncratic with the public and the consensual. This challenge, or tension, is evident in the changes in the way learners encounter and construct knowledge, and in the pedagogical imperative for students to engage with learning how to learn and go on learning throughout life. Both of these themes bring with them a tension between the local and the global and both require the re-development of a rich language for learning which can underpin and provide a framework for values education. I have argued that such a language should be locally negotiated in order that it can connect with the 'lived experiences' of learners in a rich, archaeological approach to learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)