Connected Learning

How Adults with Limited Formal Education Learn

L. Lynn Thigpen

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532679377, 9781532679384
• eBook ISBN: 9781532679391
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

How does the world's oral majority--adults with limited formal education (ALFE)--really prefer to learn? Few pause long enough to ask those who eschew print. The result of scholarly research and prolonged immersion in the Cambodian culture, Connected Learning exposes the truth about orality--the shame associated with limited formal education; the unfortunate misnomer that is orality; the place of spirituality, grace, and hope; and the obvious but overlooked learning preferences. ALFE have different ways of learning and knowing, a different epistemology and culture from print learners, even though we all begin alike. The choice is not between Ong's orality or literacy, but between learning from people or from print.Dr. Thigpen, a veteran cross-cultural worker, shares remedies for the hegemony and inequities unwittingly fostered by the literate minority. In a dominant culture where learning from people is prime, how can educators with a preference for print adapt? Providing an important tool in the Learning Quadrants diagram, Connected Learning advises teaching to the quadrant and calls for seven necessary shifts in teaching. Anyone versed in orality will admit these findings have "global implications and applications" (Steffen). The reader who heeds will positively impact a huge portion of humanity.

1

Research Purpose and Questions: The Setting

“Enter a stream at the turn; enter a boat at the port; enter a country according to its customs.”

—Cambodian proverb

While I attended undergraduate school and spent late nights studying for exams, a young Cambodian woman experienced a different kind of test. Born in the same year as I, she had only six years of schooling, was already married, and had two sons. Pol Pot and his cadre ruled her country at that time, and in the ensuing years my friend watched her parents, husband, and two sons succumb to painful deaths. Roughly two million Cambodians lost their lives during those years of atrocity.1 No formal schooling, no bedtime stories, no sense of normality existed—only grasping for survival. The effects linger to this day.

War interrupts formal education, as do poverty, learning disabilities, illness and physical difficulties, misconceptions, and many trials in life. I remember the first time I met an older Cambodian lady who had never attended school. She confided that parents in her era withheld schooling because they feared their daughters would compose love letters if they were literate. Other Khmer (Cambodian) friends could not attend school because they had to supplement the family income or their families lacked funds for books, uniforms, and obligatory payments to teachers. Many others attended only a few precious years and thus found reading painful. These stories represent the norm in much of Cambodia. In fact, Rosenbloom reported nine of fourteen million Khmer or more than 63 percent lacked adequate training in literacy at the time of her research.2

What happens when a highly educated and highly literate teacher encounters adults who never learned to read or who read at a basic level? Like many teachers across the globe, I was not prepared to train such adult learners when I arrived in Cambodia on the last day of 1999. Oblivious to differences in mindset and learning needs, I proceeded to teach in the manner I had been taught only to discover even the simplest studies were an educational disaster. I was not trained in appropriate pedagogies and could not relate to these adult learners nor fully understand their learning needs and strategies. I resonated with Smith’s eloquent explanation of my dilemma:

The gap between the two [orality and literacy] can sometimes be a yawning chasm into which no one is more likely to tumble than the scholar who ventures into the realm of orality without first shedding the bundle of literate preconceptions he habitually carries about with him.3

As a teacher in a cross-cultural setting, I lamented the effects of this socially constructed chasm. I understood the benefits of literacy but felt keenly the woes of those who had no schooling opportunities or those who had tried literacy and failed. The haunting questions in my mind were, “Why make them change? Why force literacy on them? How do they learn in their present situation, without reliance on print resources?” Much literature portrays illiteracy as a wretched situation, a problem needing eradication. Relating to healthcare and issues dealing with children, Parker chastised this adult population: “People who are illiterate are threats to themselves, their families and others.”4 Is this view correct? Before this modern age heavily skewed toward print learning, would society have agreed that illiteracy was a menace?5

Even though this study focuses on adult learners in the kingdom of Cambodia, lack of literacy and limited access to formal education is not confined to Least Developed Countries (LDCs). According to Kutner et al., ninety-three million Americans or 43 percent of the US population at that time could not follow directions using a map.6 In the most recent reports, half the population still could not identify the author of a book.7 Moreover, the International Orality Network and Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization estimated four billion people over the age of fifteen or “tw...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Research Purpose and Questions: The Setting
• Chapter 2: Introductory Literature Review: The Context and Construct
• Chapter 3: Research Method and Design: The Quest
• Chapter 4: Data Analysis: Mining for Knowledge
• Chapter 5: Interpretation and Synthesis: The Central Understanding
• Chapter 6: Interpretation and Synthesis: The Inclusive Themes
• Chapter 7: Conclusions: The Practical Wisdom
• Chapter 8: Recommendations: The Practical Wisdom Concluded
• Appendix A: Khmer Terms Used
• Appendix B: Conversing with Orality: My Experience as a Non-Reader
• Appendox C: Participant Demographics
• Appendix D: Demographics of Additional Informants
• Appendix E: Interview Guide
• Appendix F: Intermediate Level Codes Visualized
• Appendix G: Verbal Informed Consent Form
• Appendix H: Alternate Connected Learning Schematic
• Bibliography