Student-centered 2023 version
Here is a 2023 updated edition of my (Neil Cocks) 2009 book, Student-centered: Education, Freedom, and the Idea of Audience. Please feel free to download.
The book is fundamentally unaltered. I have corrected some typos, tightened some arguments, and written a new preface.
My attention was drawn to the book by Natalie England, who is currently working with Karin Lesnik-Oberstein on a PhD engaging a range of subjects, including autism, transgender, pedagogy.
When I read the book again, I was struck by how prescient it was. Generally ignored on publication, the book not only fairly accurately predicts what was going to occur in HE (it is therefore a text that lays the groundwork for Critical University Studies), but engages a variety of discourses that, at the time, seemed marginal, but have come to a kind of prominence (most obviously, perhaps, sex-based 'Gender Critical Feminism').
The first two chapters of the book read Children's Literature Criticism, as this is taken to relate to wider writing on education in the UK. The middle section of the book is a questioning reading of Carl Rogers on gender, and a National Association for the Teaching of English publication that argues for contextual rather than close reading approaches to English provision. The final two chapters work through reactionary calls for a revolution in pedagogy, the first arguing that ICT and the free market will liberate the learner, the second that sex difference should be at the forefront of UK education provision.
Natalie has very kindly (and expertly) proof-read the document for me.
A print version is also now available. Please contact us through this site for more information. .