Overview

This chapter is about the different places learners come from – their varied backgrounds and attributes: material, corporeal and symbolic. These backgrounds and attributes shape the learner's personality. They also have an enormous impact on their engagement with learning and their educational and social outcomes.

Learner attributes and personalities can be negotiated in a number of different ways. When similarity is expected or differences are regarded as unnecessary and troublesome, societies or social institutions such as schools sometimes use the mechanisms of differential exclusion (allowing in certain kinds of people but not others) or assimilation (allowing different kinds of people in on condition that they fit in by becoming like the people who are already there). Both of these approaches are based on the idea that groups work better when all their members are more or less the same, and that the in-group's way of doing things is the best.

Another way to deal with varied learner attributes is to grant differences some degree of formal recognition. This may include categorisation of groups for the purposes of creating special programs. These programs may be criticised for being limited or because they represent a laissez-faire or ‘live and let live’ approach that doesn't necessarily deal with inequalities that accompany differences.

In today's conditions of diversity in local communities and sites of human interaction such as schools, and with an increasing global interconnectedness, an inclusive approach to varied learner attributes is a more effective form of engagement and means for improving learner performance.