Definitions and Differences

Teacher
• A representative of the establishment responsible for imparting knowledge (the establishment would want imparted) and for omitting and modifying what should be omitted or modified
• Authority on a given subject
• Explicator/Guide
• Provocateur
• Interpreter of texts
• One who knows what to teach when and how

Learner
• The powerless receiver of knowledge
• The one who is empowered to receive knowledge
• The seeker of truth
• The one who has a selfish motive to learn (job, money, fame, power, desire to appear smart)
• The one who studies out of fear (failure, reprisal, displacement)
• Assimilator
• Critique/Rebel
• Disciple/Protégée

Facilitator
• The teacher who wants to learn/unlearn
• One who colludes with the establishment and works his power through invisible ways
• An expert trying to act as peer (dishonest display of modesty)
• Teacher as peer

Learners as Teachers
• The blind leading the blind
• A powerful opportunity for dominant learners
• The democratisation of knowledge/the decentralisation of authority
• The victory of amateurism over expertise/the withering away of teacher-learner divide
• Information as instruction

Learning
• Memory and forgetting
• Thinking and feeling
• Creation and destruction
• Experimentation, failure, and discovery

Teaching
• A top-down activity to impart knowledge
• A progressive profession that helps dispel myths and imparts knowledge to those who:
o Do not know
o Are beginning to know
o Think they know but really do not know
• A methodology that familiarises the “defamiliar” and defamiliarises the familiar.