Academic basis for "participatory learning"
June 7, 2019 1:04 PM   Subscribe

What is the academic basis for participatory approaches in learning, especially in classrooms where second or other languages are being taught?

When I studied CELTA lo these many years ago, it was beaten into us that the teacher's role was to clearly introduce tasks, check understanding, and then melt into the background to discreetly monitor learners as they worked, dealing with problems as they arose.

TTT (Teacher Talking Time) was taboo and to be minimised. Learning arose spontaneously from learners attempting to communicate with one another as they engaged with a task, rather than gazing out of the window as the teacher droned on at the board.

As it happens, I agree strongly with all this, and the get-out-of-the-way-and-listen technique served me well as a teacher and in many other roles since.

But I'm curious as to the history of this idea and whether there's an evidence base for it, and I can't find any papers on it (using Google Scholar - I don't have access to any more sophisticated institutional subscriptions).

Does anyone know any good academic work in this area?
posted by chappell, ambrose to Education (7 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
The phrase you want to use for Google scholar is "active learning"; you should get plenty of hits with that. The first couple of pages has a number of papers showing evidence for the general idea promoting learning (a lot of test cases are on large, undergraduate level math and science courses where it's easy enough to do a somewhat controlled experiment between different sections of a course), if not the history of how it came to be.
posted by damayanti at 1:15 PM on June 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


Another search term that might work well is "SoTL" - The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
posted by nkknkk at 2:08 PM on June 7, 2019


You may want to use "experiential learning," "learning communities," "social dialogue and elaboration," and "cooperative learning" as search terms - these concepts are all discussed, including their application to ESOL, in "Leveraging Experiential Learning Techniques For Transfer," by Nate Furman and Jim Sibthorp, in New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, no. 137, Spring 2013, Wiley Periodicals, DOI: 10.1002/ace.20041. There are also many studies referenced in the article.
posted by Little Dawn at 2:12 PM on June 7, 2019


These folks might have some academic info:
POGIL
Per the site: "POGIL is an acronym for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning. Because POGIL is a student-centered instructional approach, in a typical POGIL classroom or laboratory, students work in small teams with the instructor acting as a facilitator. The student teams use specially designed activities that generally follow a learning cycle paradigm. "
posted by tuesdayschild at 2:29 PM on June 7, 2019


I believe this is called the communicative approach in the teaching of languages.
posted by hoyland at 4:09 PM on June 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


"Student-driven learning" is what my educational psychologist colleague uses to describe this)... "Project-based learning" shows many studies providing a basic overview of research and findings on Google scholar.
posted by athirstforsalt at 11:27 PM on June 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


In math, I've seen it called inquiry-based learning.
posted by YoloMortemPeccatoris at 12:48 PM on June 8, 2019


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