From competencies to learning outcomes
(2014) XXVI Conference CESE, Governing Educational Spaces. Knowledge, Teaching and Learning in Transition — Location: Freiburg (10.June.2014)
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Fromcompetencestolearningoutcomes.pptx
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- Abstract
- On the basis of the concept of “European higher education apparatus” (EHEA, Croché 2010), this paper aims to present the way the learning outcomes (LO) approach is being introduced and generalized in the French-speaking Belgian university education. The data are the result of a doctoral research in progress (Souto Lopez 2014), based on semi-directing interviews of Belgian universities actors and documentary analyses (official texts, European texts, decrees, texts issued by the universities, pedagogical theories). The objective is to show how the EHEA manages to provide new orientations to the finalities of a pedagogical practice (competences approach), by introducing one of its elements (LO) via other elements (European qualification framework, Dublin descriptors, ECTS label, European standards and guidelines for quality assurance). The purpose of the competences approach, according to the pedagogues, is to improve the quality and the effectiveness of teaching and learning, while placing the student at the center of his learning process and make him autonomous and responsible of his own education. The LO approach aims to support the mobility of the students and the workers, the transparency, the comparability and the competitiveness of the European systems of higher education within the framework of the development of a knowledge economy. It is by adding them on top of the pedagogical purposes of the competences approach that the political objectives of the LO approach get to become essential on the French-speaking Belgian university education. If this “adjunction” is possible, it is because a compatibility between the two approaches, through various connection points (autonomy and responsibility for the student, steering of the studies programs, production of a normative and prescriptive pedagogical discourse, etc.), exists. At first, using the basic concepts of the sociology of the translation (Akrich et al. 2006), the communication will present the conditions which made possible the rise of the pedagogy in the French-speaking Belgian universities. Subsequently, the history of the competences approach that starts within faculties of engineers and medicine will be presented. Thirdly, I’ll describe how the various European instruments conveying the learning outcomes approach were adapted in French-speaking Belgium. Finally, theoretical considerations relating to the way the European higher education apparatus manages to impose its logic through the elements that it introduces into the educational system will be presented.
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Souto Lopez, M. (2014). From competencies to learning outcomes. XXVI Conference CESE, Governing Educational Spaces. Knowledge, Teaching and Learning in Transition, Freiburg. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/194650