The purpose of this article is to explore and reflect on the changing professional practice of educator facilitatormentors in relation to student-centred learning and learner agency in vocational institutions across three countries. The collaborative work stands against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and exploring different ways of delivering skills and competencies suited to the market and how to empower adult learners. We were motivated by our passion for learning from others, even if we had to meet online over three time zones rather than in person as before.
CONTEXTStudent-centred learning (SCL) is a term widely used in literature about the higher education sector and the delivery of services. It seems to be a catch-all for a broad group of pedagogical concepts and approaches focussing on the learner and their learning. At the core are active learning, deeply reflective and experiential learning, shifts in responsibility and accountability to the learner, learner autonomy, the physical environment where learning takes place, and more focus on the relationship between the learner and the teacher. In European policy, SCL aims at effective learning, higher learning outcomes, and the overall purpose is competencies suited for the labour market (European Higher Education Area [EHEA], 2009;Dakovic & Zhang, 2021). As a pedagogical approach, the purpose is wider, including deeper transformational learning, critical and humanist education and whole-person learning (Hoidn & Reusser, 2021).Recently, the role of the teacher has seen more scrutiny; there is a clear move to see the teacher as a mentorfacilitator, focussing on the learner's learning journey rather than on the content being studied (Hoidn & Reusser, 2021). Interestingly enough, this concept is not new and can be traced back to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the work of John Dewey, who linked problem-solving and learning with the pace being set by the learner, and the constructivist theories of Piaget and Vygotsky (Hoidn & Reusser, 2021;Lefrançois, 2019). However, what is missing from much of the discussion is the high dimensionality (many facets) of the identity of the learner and how that translates into the development of the relationships, the learning, and the assessment of progress and transformative outcomes. Even though we are only starting our investigative journey, we have already uncovered exciting aspects of what we would like to call the recognition and development of the learner's agency.The concept of changing learner (and mentor-facilitator) agency is core to the approach we aim to follow. Part of what we hope to develop further, in the collaboration under the Global Polytechnic Alliance (VIA University College, n.d.), is how this concept is understood and perceived in each of the participating organisations. We plan to draw carefully on several resources as we continue this work. We are careful to state that this is a view that we use as a starting point for discussion, internally and externally.
