Summary - Chapter 5: Learning Personalities

LEARNER PERSONALITIES

FROM EXCLUSIONTO ASSIMILATION: THE MODERN PAST

RECOGNITION: MORE RECENT TIMES

INCLUSION: TOWARDS NEW LEARNING

Dimension 1: Material conditions

• Social class, geographical locale and family context have the effect of excluding people from access to material resources

• If access is to be gained, the excluded group needs to assimilate to the ideas and norms of the more powerful and affluent group

• Recognising
the differences in access
to material resources, locale and family context, but without doing anything that noticeably redresses these differences

• Realising the democratic promise: the newly significant role of schools
in a ‘knowledge economy’

Dimension 2: Corporeal attributes

• Excluding people or isolating them into separate institutions or groups on the basis of age, race, sex and sexuality or body form, or allowing minimal mobility on condition of assimilation to a ‘norm’

• Recognising differences in
a ‘laissez-faire’ kind of way, without making a significant impact on social outcomes

• Developing strategies for inclusion in which corporeal differences do not create disadvantage

Dimension 3: Symbolic differences

• Excluding people on the basis of culture, language, gender, affinity and persona, or forcing them to assimilate

• A sense
of cultural dissolution and fragmentation as symbolic differences proliferate

• Living productively with symbolic differences that
are becoming
more different – diverging – while people are becoming more expansively sociable and their identities increasingly multilayered