Opening up pedagogies: Making a space for children

Abstract

This article argues that children and young people in places such as England or the USA are subjected to an educational regime which constrains their development and eclipses their emergent identities. Paradoxically, the accountability systems which claim to make children’s learning visible to management create a distortion of vision by emphasising only the child’s ‘data shadow’. The article argues for pedagogies which provide space for each learner’s authentic encounter with our cultural inheritance as human beings. It concludes by presenting the idea of ‘open architectures’, a set of pedagogical methods which holds children together as a learning community while providing spaces for initiative.