Organizing Logics of Learner-Centered Instruction: Institutional Logics, School Infrastructures, and Classroom Authority

Abstract

Learner-centered instruction empowers young people. Rather than being passive participants, young people actively control their own learning and share responsibility for others' learning in the service of shared goals and expectations. This approach serves as a radical counterbalance in times and contexts when power concentrates among the most privileged. Positioning young people as leaders, balancing individual and collective well-being towards the common good, builds their capacity to share power in the service of building just and equitable futures. My three-paper dissertation shows how schools promote learner-centered instruction. Paper one presents a theoretical framework that connects school infrastructures to the institutional logics that educators enact in their instruction. I argue that school infrastructures, or the practices and resources that support and coordinate instruction, make institutional logics, or widely shared values, available and actionable by shaping educators’ everyday social and material conditions. Paper two examines how one dimension of school infrastructures, instructional infrastructure, shaped the institutional logics that educators in Waldorf, Montessori, and free schools enacted. The three schools’ instructional infrastructures positioned learners as either active participants, co-leaders, or owners of their learning—varying educators’ dependency on learners. Institutional logics that organized authority differently between educators and learners became practical ways of negotiating the varying levels of dependency those educators had on learners across the three schools. Paper three focuses on how learner-centered schools set different instructional paces by shaping instructional durations and productivity demands. These two factors can be designed to set what I term a human pace, placing demands on educators without engendering a sense of urgency that reproduces dominant power structures. Variation in those productivity demands, such as the rate of learners’ academic or leadership development, can constrain which institutional logics educators enact in their instruction, enabling schools to promote their specific version of learner-centered instruction. The institutional logics school infrastructures promote impacts classroom authority. The challenge for learner-centered schools lies in designing infrastructures that make available and actionable institutional logics that situate authority in collective power, shared responsibilities, and the common good, which are core to empowering young people and constructing a just and equitable future.