A learner autonomous pedagogy has such attributes as resource centres in the classroom or even outside the classroom like a library and a computer lab, where students can have uninhibited access to what they need or want to learn

Anyone with a non-rebellious inclination and schooled predominantly under a teacher-centred system of education expects learning and knowledge to trickle down from the teachers.

This writer is amongst that anyone, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered much had he gone on to pursue any profession other than teaching.

The pedagogical spirit of today is clearly in favour of promoting learner autonomy as opposed to heteronomy, which, by numerous scholarly definitions of the word, he was surely subject to.

Staying with scholarly definitions, the term, learner autonomy, was first coined in 1981 by Henric Holec, who defined it as the “ability to take charge of one’s own learning”. This implies that learners take ownership and make decisions for their learning themselves.

Heteronomy, by contrast, is seen to be lying at the opposite end of this continuum, a top down pedagogy, and heavily teacher-centred.

All these exposures have had an unavoidable implication in his classroom, and he might well be a representative character here of teachers who oscillate between heteronomy and autonomy, but clearly favouring the latter nonetheless.

A combination of various approaches have been adopted in order to promote learner autonomy. Workshops and trainings, to the extent that this writer has attended and is familiar with, are geared towards the objective of making students lifelong learners and much less reliant on outside agency, or teachers. The newly formulated national educational framework enshrines this idea and urges the concerned stakeholders to strive for it.

If this were to be called a paradigm shift, it indeed may have happened in terms of policy documents and at the theoretical level, but the shift in practical terms may not be as swift. They take place piecemeal, with teachers indeed trying out new or the newly suggested ways while reverting time and again to the familiar and known practices.

As long as they have been trying - this teacher for one has consistently been trying - it could be taken as a sign of progress.

A major dilemma that a teacher faces though is the question of how much autonomy is good autonomy. And what is he/she to do of a scenario where what a learner needs to learn is already predetermined by the curriculum?

Promoting learner autonomy becomes even more challenging for teachers in the backdrop of time-bound examinations, which the students must compulsorily take.

Ergo, the torn teacher, who despite the knowledge of the known benefits of learner autonomy, cannot put it into practice all the time. In whatsoever proportion it does happen though, if the teachers are making it happen, they might have been doing a good job.

A learner autonomous pedagogy has such attributes as resource centres in the classroom or even outside the classroom like a library and a computer lab, where they can have uninhibited access to what they need or want to learn.

Encouraging portfolio-based learning, coupled with a lot of self-reflection and journals about one’s process of learning, is another approach towards that goal.

Any teacher who has upwards of 25 students and a 45-minute time slot per day, without a co-teacher, can well relate the amount of patience and flexibility required for such modes of learning.

In a recently held weekly speakers’ club of Kathmandu University, Prof. Zakia Sarwar, founding member and Hon. Executive Director of Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers (SPELT), observed that the teachers’ mindset is the biggest hurdle to learner autonomy.

It surely is, especially if still in this day and age, where a plethora of other means are at the disposal of the students to learn, teachers hold fast to ‘I teach, you learn’ position.

However, even the ones with an open mindset face a different kind of challenge - the challenge resulting much less from their own conviction of the expected fruits of learner-centredness than from the constraints posed by the system under which both the teachers and learners must operate.

Reading of the available literature on learner autonomy makes this writer feel, in his capacity as a teacher, that perhaps it is too idealistic to implement and expect learner autonomy in its entirety.

That actually may be too high and an unrealistic goal to set in the first place. Besides the various institutional constraints, there is also skepticism that arises in the teachers out of the contradictions between the real classroom learning outcomes and various such theoretical claims.

The best that this writer has been able to do as a teacher is make efforts towards promoting learner autonomy whenever possible and feasible.

Students collaborate, make use of learning centres, work on self-chosen projects - all of which fits the bill of learner autonomy. On other days, it is not uncommon to find their teachers holding forth, explaining if not lecturing and demanding certain answers to be written in a certain way while still trying to keep their minds open. It might still be possible to make the students independent and responsible towards the path of life-long learning amidst just the right bit of teacher intervention.