Child Centred Education

What is child-centred education?

Where do its core ideas stem from?

What do these ideas mean for children and teachers today?

Child-centred education is central to contemporary debates about what constitutes effective teaching and learning. Frequently pitched against formal approaches to education, it is often understood to mean a laissez-faire approach to teaching and learning with little substance and little intervention on the part of adults. Others argue that child-centred education has been superseded by a subject-driven and target led approach, one in which the child’s interests and ideas have been marginalised and where teachers have become mere technicians, trained to deliver a highly prescriptive curriculum content.

Child-Centred Education aims to unravel the complexities and nuances surrounding these polarised positions. Through an analysis of groundbreaking research, policy initiatives and illustrated with concrete examples of practice, it presents an accessible introduction to child-centred education. Key issues explored include:

• how far a child-centred approach is realistic in the modern classroom
• the role of play in learning and children’s live more widely
• the impact of new technologies and social networking
• creativity and personalisation
• child-centred approaches for the highly diverse classroom
• international research into alternative pedagogies for the primary school
• the relationship between the child, school and politics.

Offering a detailed, engaging exploration of both historical and contemporary perspectives, Child-Centred Education is for all student and practising primary teachers, education studies students and all those undertaking related master levels courses.

Dr Sue Rogers is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Learning, Curriculum and Communication, the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. Her research interests include early childhood pedagogy, outdoor play, play as an aesthetic and affective experience in early childhood curriculum, post structuralist approaches to analysing classroom processes, and academic identity in HE.