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What is not “purpose driven” about “externally imposed meta-goals”? To me it seems that it doesn’t matter where the goals come from if an activity is to be purpose driven. He argues, drawing on Lankshear et al (1996) that learner-centered pedagogies, or this particular variety of, are different from humanistic experiential pedagogies, for the reason given above and because the pedagogy is self directed. Then in the last two sentences of the paragraph I refer to describes two essential tenets of humanist education: reconfiguring of the teacher-student relationship; and availability of information through cyberspace.
The only real difference that I can ascertain is the information being available through cyberspace rather than “meatspace” (just looked up the opposite of cyberspace and came up with this rather unlovely term).
There is a purpose to both learner-centered and humanist pedagodies (as juxtaposed by Usher). The teacher-student relationship is changed in both pedagogies. Information is sought on an ‘as required and in the direction I’m going’ basis. Without an overall purpose there would be no pedagogy, would there? Maybe the emphasis in Usher’s statement is on the word ‘experiential’. Humanistic experiential pedagogy. Making meaning through direct experience in a humanistic way. But again, how is that so different from doing the same in a learner-centered way? Maybe the difference is in the presence/absence of the teacher? But by using the word pedagogy Usher still imples teacher presence of some kind for both of the methodologies he proposes. There appears to be no real difference at all.