Abstract
There are many classroom teaching approaches available, but they generally all have one fundamental commonality: they require some form of human communication. As human communication is subject to several perceptual errors in both listening and seeing, there are challenges imposed on the success of the communication. The ability of the teacher and the students to communicate effectively with each other is a factor for the success of each reaching their goals. The teacher imparts his/her knowledge in the classroom, but as von Foerster reminds us: “It’s the listener, not the speaker, who determines the meaning of an utterance” (Glasersfeld, 2007); for the listener contextualises this information based on their own past lived experience. Thus, the student’s epistemology and their expression of their understanding is integral in the classroom context. This position paper presents a cybernetic approach to the teacher-learner system, challenging traditional ideas about the role of each actor within the system, with special attention given to Pask’s (1976) Conversation Theory and its fit for purpose in a contextual learning system.