Social Difference and the Problem of the
“Unique Individual”: An Uneasy Legacy of
Child-Centred Pedagogy
Naomi Norquay
york university
In this article I explore how the discourse of child-centred pedagogy both shapes and
limits how teachers talk about issues of social difference in their teaching practice. By
examining the testimony of four experienced inner-city elementary teachers, I problema-
tize two key tenets of child-centred pedagogy: the child as “unique individual” and the
teacher as neutral change agent. I also explore these two subject positions in relation to
Whiteness and White privilege. What does child-centred pedagogy hold in common with
White privilege, in terms of how it constructs social identities? This article is framed by
a concern for the ramifications of the legacy of child-centred pedagogy for current-day
teacher education students, who are learning to teach in increasingly diverse contexts.
Dans cet article, l’auteure explore comment le discours de la pédagogie centrée sur
l’enfant façonne et limite à la fois la manière dont les enseignants abordent les questions
de différence sociale dans leur enseignement. En examinant le témoignage de quatre
enseignants d’expérience travaillant dans des écoles de quartiers défavorisés, l’auteure se
penche sur deux principes clés de la pédagogie centrée sur l’enfant : l’enfant comme indi-
vidu unique et l’enseignant comme agent neutre de changement. Elle explore la question
de privilège liée à l’appartenance à la majorité de race blanche. Cet article tient compte
de l’inquiétude que suscitent les ramifications du legs de la pédagogie centrée sur l’enfant
sur les étudiants-maîtres d’aujourd’hui qui sont appelés à enseigner dans des contextes de
plus en plus diversifiés.
A persistent problem I face in my pre-service teaching in the Faculty of Educa-
tion at York University is that my attempts to deepen students’ understandings
of the important connections between identity, social difference, and social
equity in educational sites remain largely the preserve of the university class-
room. Such understandings seldom find their way into the beginning teaching
practices of these students. Although this split between what is learned and what
is practiced is a common dilemma for teacher educators (Lesko & Bloom, 1998;
Sleeter, 1993), it seems to me that we have limited our interrogations to our own
practices and have not readily or comfortably interrogated the contexts in which
our students gain their practical experience. To do so might be perceived as
“teacher-bashing” and there is certainly enough of that going on already, thanks
to the conservative discourses shaping public opinion and much government
policy. We know that our students largely find themselves in host classrooms
183 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 24, 2 (1999): 183–196
184 NAOMI NORQUAY
where the pervasiveness of a conservative discourse has either ignored issues of
equity completely, or has relegated them to add-on curricular activities (Ghosh,
1996; Robertson-Baghel, 1998).
For several years, I had the opportunity to place many of my students in
downtown Toronto schools that have long histories of dealing with equity issues,
particularly those shaped by class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Despite the
richness of opportunities these placements provided, the students placed in these
schools seemed no better able than their counterparts in more conservative and
less diverse placements to connect to their practicum placements the issues of
identity, difference, and equity that we worked with in our university classroom.
For the most part, my students did not use the various progressive discourses we
explored and used in class—namely feminist, antiracist, and poststructuralist
discourses—to understand either their practicum experiences or the social
relations that populate those sites of learning. For example, in a final assignment
in which they observed two children in their host classrooms, focusing on these
children as learners, they did not employ these discourses in their interpretations.
Instead, they almost uniformly described these children as “unique individuals,”
devoid of any social markers such as class, gender, ethnicity, or race. Eschewing
the discursive frames we worked with in my class, the student teachers used a
liberal humanist discourse focused on child development theories from the field
of developmental psychology.
When I began to grapple with this disjuncture, I found myself returning to the
testimony of a group of elementary school teachers who had participated in a
study I undertook in 1990, investigating teaching practices around issues of
social difference. That particular research project involved a group of inner-city
teachers, all of whom were, like me, White women.
1
The project asked partici-
pants to interrogate their current teaching practices, specifically those concerning
issues of gender, race, and class. All held leadership roles in this regard. All
described themselves as “progressive educators” using “child-centred” pedagogy
in their classroom teaching practice. They also taught in some of the same
inner-city schools where I later placed some of my students.
It occurred to me that it might be useful to take a close look at how these
experienced, progressive teachers talked about their teaching practices around
issues of social difference. What discourses did they use to “make sense” of the
learners in their child-centred classrooms? This seemed like a useful endeavour
because I knew from talking to my students on supervisory visits to their host
schools that they were seeing a range of teaching practices which did address the
children’s social identities. Was there a gap between practice and how that
practice was explained and articulated to my students? Did this gap explain why
my students chose to limit their analyses of children to the liberal humanist
discourse of developmental psychology? Although this particular discourse is
central to other courses they take, it did not make sense to me that what we
SOCIAL DIFFERENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF THE “UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL” 185
worked with in class completely disappeared in their analyses of the children in
their host classrooms, for an assignment attached to my course. During our
university seminars, they welcomed all my efforts to get them to interrogate their
own social locations and the complex and tricky terrain of social identity and
social equity in the classroom.
I here explore how these four progressive educators employed the discourse
of developmentalpsychology when they discussed their teaching practices around
issues of social difference. Developmental psychology is the bedrock on which
child-centred pedagogy has been both imagined and sustained (Silin, 1995;
Walkerdine, 1985, 1990). Although child-centred pedagogy is now in retreat, it
was the foundation upon which most experienced elementary teachers trained and
built their careers. Since the majority of Ontario’s elementary teachers have been
teaching for more than 20 years, its legacy is quite substantial.
What concerns me is how the embedded assumptions about student identity
and teacher role that inform child-centred pedagogy populate teachers’ talk about
their practice. How does this talk produce subjects devoid of social and cultural
identities, where children are cherished “unique individuals” and teachers are
neutral “change agents”? It was my hunch that the progressive multicultural and
antiracist curricular initiatives the participants undertook in their teaching practice
were often undermined by the very language they used to understand and artic-
ulate who their students were, and who they themselves were in relation to those
students.
At the time of the study I was impressed and heartened by the kinds of initia-
tives I saw. Laurie’s Grade 1/2/3 multicultural curriculum included in-depth
investigation of the world’s major religions and her antiracist curriculum included
class discussions about anti-Semitism and homelessness. She had recently taken
her class on an excursion to the (then) new monument honouring Chinese
Canadian railroad workers. Debbie focused on issues of gender; she took care to
disrupt the gender-specific activities so often reproduced in a kindergarten
classroom. Roberta’s Grade 4/5 curriculum included social action research on
local environment issues and in-depth studies of the many cultures and language
groups represented in her classroom. Kathleen’s Grade 8 curriculum included an
in-depth unit on gender stereotyping and a series of workshops on protest songs,
wherein topics such as racism and poverty were explored. The schools where
they taught had explicit antiracist policies and inclusive school-wide curricular
activities. In one school, the Chinese-Vietnamese New Year’s celebration is the
highlight of the year.
All four had considerable experience and expertise in inner-city schools, each
averaging 20 years. They all chose to focus their teaching careers in the inner
city. The “new age” of progressive education was dawning when they were
attending teachers’ college and beginning their teaching careers. The stories they
told about beginning their teaching careers echo the language of that era. All four
saw themselves as change agents, anxious to do their part in righting the wrongs
186 NAOMI NORQUAY
of an unjust and inequitable society. Laurie stated that one of the reasons she
was drawn to the inner city was because of her interest in the connections
between “progressive education and political reform” (interview February 3,
1990). Roberta explained her interest in the inner city in terms of “that whole
consciousness-raising thing what was happening to me. In my first classroom
there were thirty-eight kids and not one of them could read” (interview Febru-
ary 9, 1990). Debbie talked about realizing that “the world wasn’t quite as
beautiful as I thought” and said that she wanted to work in the inner city because
“I thought I could make it better” (interview February 6, 1990). One of the
factors drawing Kathleen to the inner city was her “sense of social justice” (inter-
view February 26, 1990) These articulations quite strikingly reflect the tenets of
progressive education.
Progressive education, as articulated in the Hall-Dennis Report (Hall & Den-
nis, 1968), held out a compelling promise that with the right kind of programmes
and the right kind of teachers, children who had traditionally failed in the school-
ing system would meet with academic success. Consider the report’s opening
statement:
Education is the instrument which will break the shackles of ignorance, of doubt, and of
frustration; it will take all who respond to its call out of their poverty, their slums and
their despair; that will spur the talented to find heights of achievement and provide every
child with the experience of success. (p. 9)
This promise was to be brought into fruition by the committed and facilitative
role of classroom teachers. The Hall-Dennis Report was quite clear about this:
Attacks on this problem [poverty] are taking place in a handful of “inner-city” schools
serving socio-economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In such schools, one can see
poorly-clad youngsters talking and moving about easily in colourful classrooms stimulated
and taught with the most technical and sensitive skills by dedicated and patient teachers
who are guided and supported by crusading principals. (Hall & Dennis, 1968, p. 39)
Progressive education defined the social conditions and teacher requirements
to which child-centred pedagogy would respond. Consider Walkerdine’s descrip-
tion of her early teaching career:
In 1968 I became a primary school teacher. I was swayed by the romantic promise of
progressivism in education, and I linked poverty and inner-city decay with the terrible
regimentation and the “old-fashioned” repressive and silencing methods. . . . I loved my
inner-city children with a fierce passion. For under my nurturance their illiteracy would
be converted into inner-city poetry. (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 18)
In addition to the emphasis on poverty and on the important role of committed
teachers, progressive education also embraced the notion of multiculturalism. In
SOCIAL DIFFERENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF THE “UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL” 187
Ontario, documents such as The Formative Years (Ontario Ministry of Education,
1975b), Education in the Primary and Junior Divisions (Ontario Ministry of
Education, 1975a), and Observing Children (Norris & Boucher, 1980) were
replete with many photographs of “inner-city” children, from a variety of cultural
and racial backgrounds.
2
However, the only place social differences were dis-
cussed was in Education in the Primary and Junior Divisions (Ontario Ministry
of Education, 1975a) under a heading entitled “Individual Differences.” Social
difference was reconfigured as individual difference, which was to be accepted,
tolerated, and, indeed, celebrated:
Central to this notion of multiculturalism is the idea of acceptance—the acceptance by
the school of all children with their wide variations in ability, physique and personality.
(p. 10)
I suggest that this statement rests on the assumption that, within child-centred
pedagogy, the only differences that might matter are those which dedicated
teachers can improve. Differing abilities can be nurtured, differing physiques
can be accommodated, and differing personalities can be accepted or induced
(through sensitive nurturing) to change.
There are three points I wish to make about these articulations of the “players”
in the arena of progressive education/child-centred pedagogy. First, poverty was
seen as the overarching frame for social differences of all kinds and the inner
city was synonymous with social difference. Often these terms are used inter-
changeably, as if one were the qualifier or descriptor of the other. In this frame,
social differences occur only in communities which are poor or lacking. Second,
progressive education clearly names teachers as the key change agents. As such,
they are seen to be neutral: capable of diminishing difference through their dedi-
cation and expertise. However, within this frame, they themselves get detached
from their own social locations and social identities, which stand outside their
role as teacher. Third, the acknowledgement and inclusion of children from a
wide variety of cultural and racial backgrounds in curriculum documents recon-
figure these social identities as individual ones.
The participants in my study were quite clear that progressive education was
the preserve of the inner city, where social difference was synonymous with
societal inequities. They made clear connections between progressive education
and child-centred pedagogy. The inner city offered pedagogical innovations and
approaches that differed from the “traditional” approaches to teaching still used
in the city’s middle-class school districts. Kathleen, Laurie, Roberta, and Debbie
all spoke of being attracted to what they specifically named as “child-centred,
activity based” programming, which they understood to be the preserve of the
inner city. Laurie identified the middle-class school where she had first taught
as being conservative: “it was very traditional, there were nice people . . . and