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Child Centred Approaches
It appears that there are some general misunderstandings about the issues of child
friendly and child centred approaches in education. Many educational professionals
tend to think that child friendly is more or less the same as child centred. Therefore it
is important to make a clear division between these two approaches:
• Child friendly approaches: the teacher behaves in a safe and respectful manner
towards the children, regardless of their gender, without any abuse or physical
punishment. The children feel safe, encouraged and happy in school; their
performances improve gradually and the drop out rates decline.
• Child centred approaches: the teacher challenges the children in a safe and
respectful manner to develop (together and individually) their own solutions to
problems given, thus encouraging co-operation, the development of life skills,
their analysing power, their capacity to organise themselves. The children feel
safe, encouraged, happy and empowered in school, and have more fun; their
performances rise significantly and the drop out rates decline even more.
Life-skills competencies
It is a general assumption that education should teach the pupils or students (boys
and girls) how to participate effectively and satisfactory in their society. In other
words: education should teach them how to become a responsible person, who takes
the obligation to be accountable for relatives, for the development of the society, and
for the maintenance of the environment. It also teaches them how to achieve
appropriate living conditions and health, hence helping them to care for themselves
ánd for those who are depending on them, like elderly people, children and the
disabled. Finally it teaches them how to create safe living conditions, through honest,
peaceful and righteous attitudes and behaviour.
In order to enhance the life skills competencies (or values) of responsibility, care and
safety, it is necessary to make the pupils acquainted with real life situations, hence
strengthening their problem solving capacities. For solving problems it is necessary
to organise oneself. Through processes of self-organisation people learn to deal with
problems in a satisfactory manner. This can only be achieved through child-centred
approaches: the child friendly approach might still be teacher centred and knowledge
based, while the child centred approach is empathically problem and process
oriented. The children learn themselves to analyse a problem, to develop strategies
and to mobilise resources to solve them, and to evaluate the outcomes critically. This
way they strongly enhance their life skill competencies. In other words: they learn
how to empower themselves. Empowerment is understood here as a process by
which people learn to achieve control over their own lives and resources, through
self-organisation.
A paradigm shift from teacher centred towards child centred approaches could be
enhanced and supported by a better understanding of some constructivist concepts.
One of these is the Empowerment Triangle (ET), for building self organisation
