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Outcomes-based learning, as described in recent policy documents in Ontario, offers a narrow, controlling vision of teachers and learners, and of diversity and ecology. Although the documents profess an integrative vision, they provide lists of "expectations" that students are required to reach. In this article we criticize these documents for their failure to acknowledge the experiences of either learners or teachers, for superficial treatment of diversity and ecology, and for an internal contradiction that imposes a rigid, lock-step system upon an integrative vision of teaching and learning. Their attempt to describe education using the metaphor of lists, as in lists of parts to be assembled in a machine, is outdated. We suggest other metaphors -- a spiral, coil, or mobius strip -- and discuss one example, the early childhood schools from the municipality of Reggio Emilia, Italy, to illustrate these more complex metaphors.
L'apprentissage axe sur les resultats, tel qu'il est decrit dans les recents documents ministeriels de l'Ontario, offre une vision etroite et restreignante des enseignants et des apprenants ainsi que de la diversite et de l'ecologie scolaires. Les documents professent une vision integrative; pourtant, ils fournissent des listes precises de resultats a atteindre. Les auteurs critiquent ces documents qui, a leur avis, ne tiennent pas compte des experiences des eleves et des enseignants, envisagent d'une maniere superficielle la diversite et l'ecologie scolaires et comportent une contradiction interne dans la mesure ou ils superposent, a une vision dite integrative, un systeme rigide a echelons fixes. Les auteurs suggerent de remplacer la metaphore des listes de pieces d'assemblage par celles de la spirale, du serpentin ou du ruban de Mobius. Ils proposent, comme exemple, celui de la municipalite de Reggio Emilia, en Italie.
A common response to criticism of public education in Canada and the United States has been to establish higher standards through the development of common curricular outcomes across a school district, province, state, or nation (Barlow & Robertson, 1994; Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Brown, 1991). The Department of Education in Alberta, for example, has reformulated its programs into "results-based curricula" that focus on observable and measurable learning outcomes, shifting the curriculum from "what is taught to what is learned by each student" (Barlow & Robertson, 1994, p. 213). The Ontario Ministry of...