Dimensions of Adult Learning

Adult education and training in a global era

Griff Foley, Griff Foley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Adult education has never been more important or urgent than it is today Few educators have had the impact on adult education of Griff Foley.
Professor Peter McLaren, University of California, Los Angeles This timely and valuable book makes an important contribution to our understanding of key recent developments in adult education and their significance. Reflecting the increasingly global nature of scholarship in the field, well-respected international contributors analyse issues facing practitioners today, and consider how these can be most positively embraced to further the international cause of adult learning and social justice.
Janet Hannah, University of Nottingham Learning is central to all aspects of human life, and failure to learn brings dire consequences. As our world becomes more integrated and complex, adult learning has become more important. Dimensions of Adult Learning offers a broad overview of adult learning in the workplace and community. Written by a team of international experts, it introduces the core skills and knowledge which underpin effective practice. It examines adult education policy and research, and highlights the social nature of adult learning. It also examines adult learning in different contexts: on-line learning, problem-based learning, organisational and vocational learning. Dimensions of Adult Learning is an essential reference for professionals and students.Griff Foley is Research Associate in Adult Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is author of Learning in Social Action and Strategic Learning.

PART I
Our Approach

1
INTRODUCTION: THE STATE OF ADULT EDUCATION AND LEARNING

Griff Foley

This book’s progenitor was designed as a text for Australian adult educators doing university-based continuing professional education. It aimed to help adult educators understand their practice. The emphasis was on how theory derived from both experience and study could help adult educators do their work better.

This book retains the original purpose but adds others. It is written not just for adult educators but for the growing range of people who have an interest in adult learning and education.

The changes in the book reflect changes in society and education. In the past 30 years the provision of adult education, and thinking about adult learning, have changed radically. University extension education has all but disappeared, and universities have expanded their professional education offerings. Community-based education has had to become largely self-supporting, and so has become much more businesslike in both its organisation and course offerings. Technical or vocational education has expanded and diversified, adding ‘further education’ to its title in many countries. Numerous fields of practice have generated their own distinctive forms of education—public health, the environment, community arts, nursing and so on. Human resource development is now concerned not just with training but with broader issues of workplace learning and change, generating a new field of practice and study, organisational learning.

These changes make it harder to publish a meaningful and useful book called Understanding Adult Education and Training. The field of ‘adult education’ is fragmenting, diversifying and expanding. Many people, including some contributors to this book, criticise aspects of this transformation. Such critique is necessary. But we also need to look for opportunities in the changes—spaces in which to do progressive work. Our capacity to do this begins with a sharper and more expansive understanding of adult learning.

THE LEARNING DIMENSION

Learning is central to human life—as essential as work or friendship. As the American experiential learning theorist David Kolb (1984) has noted, learning is human beings’ primary mode of adaptation: if we don’t learn we may not survive, and we certainly won’t prosper. Learning is complex and multifaceted, and should not be equated with formal education.

All human activity has a learning dimension. People learn, continually, informally and formally, in many different settings: in workplaces, in families, through leisure activities, through community activities, and in political action. There are at least four forms of adult learning.

Formal education

This is the form of adult learning with which we are most familiar. Its distinguishing characteristics are that it is organised by professional educators, there is a defined curriculum, and it often leads to a qualification. It includes study in educational institutions such as universities and technical and further education colleges, and sequenced training sessions in workplaces.

Non-formal education

This sort of learning occurs when people see a need for some sort of systematic instruction, but in a one-off or sporadic way. Examples include workers being trained to operate a new machine, or environmental activists undertaking non-violent direct-action training.

Informal learning

This sort of learning occurs when people consciously try to learn from their experience. It involves individual or group reflection and discussion, but does not involve formal instruction. Examples include the management committee of a community centre reviewing the operations of its organisation, or workers redesigning their jobs in consultation with management.

Incidental learning

This type of learning occurs while people perform other activities. So, for example, an experienced mechanic has learned a lot about cars, and elderly gardeners carry a great deal of knowledge of their craft. Such learning is incidental to the activity in which the person is involved, and is often tacit and not seen as learning—at least not at the time of its occurrence.

As people live and work they continually learn. As Stephen Brookfield (1986:150) has noted, most adult learning is not acquired in formal courses but is gained through experience or through participation in an aspect of social life such as work, community action or family activities. Until recently, writers on adult education paid little attention to informal and incidental learning (see Marsick & Watkins 1991; Foley 1999). We are just beginning to study and act on these forms of learning. In what follows, I outline some of the directions we might take.

Learning is often unplanned, is often tacit, and may be constructive or destructive. The content of learning may be technical (about how to do a particular task); or it may be social, cultural and political (about how people relate to each other in a particular situation, about what their actual core values are, or about who has power and how they use it).

If there is learning there is also non-learning. People often fail to learn, or actively resist learning. Consider smokers, who persist with the habit in the face of overwhelming evidence of its harmfulness. Or countries, like Australia, that continue to clear marginal arid land for farming despite the knowledge that this is economically unviable and ecologically destructive. Or a university department that attributes falling enrolments to a shrinking pool of clients in the face of clear evidence of student dissatisfaction with the quality of teaching. (For an extended discussion of failure to learn, see Foley 2001: ch 5.)

If there is education there is also miseducation. Educators like to distinguish between propaganda and education, seeing the one as closed, manipulative and oppressive, and the other as open, democratic and emancipatory. While this distinction has its uses, adult educators also need to become aware of propaganda as a powerful and commonly used form of distorted and distorting education. Propaganda works on simplification: it appeals to fear, hatred, anger and envy. The resources available for corporate and government propaganda, and the scale of it, often make the efforts of adult educators appear puny.

Most learning episodes combine learning and non-learning, education and miseducation. The history of HIV-AIDS education illustrates this complexity.

When it emerged, HIV-AIDS was considered to be a short-term problem, largely confined to the gay community. Workers in the field assumed that medical treatment and education would quickly bring the virus under control. Early education programs were aimed at mass audiences and aimed to motivate individuals to change their behaviour. These programs often sought change by focusing on the negative consequences of practices such as unprotected anal intercourse or the sharing of intravenous needles. This ‘social marketing’approach to HIV education, which has also been applied to issues such as road safety and reducing cigarette smoking, assumes that if sound information is transmitted to the ‘target’ audience in a convincing way then ‘customers’or ‘consumers’will behave in the way desired by the originator of the message (Foley 1997).

After initial apparent success in western countries in the 1980s it became clear that social marketing education was not reducing risk-taking behaviour. Reviewing their experience, workers and researchers generated a list of reasons why:

• HIV education often concentrated on providing information and neglected behaviour and the social environment that shapes it.
• Many HIV education programs relied on one-way communication.
• HIV education often treated the virus as a single issue, rather than as part of a wider set of problems including poverty, lack of political power and discrimination.
• Few HIV-AIDS services integrated education and treatment.
• Few HIV education programs tackled the distrust that many people feel towards government and science.
• Programs tended to focus on individual behaviour and to neglect the social and political factors that shaped that behaviour.

This last factor points to the basic problem with social marketing education: it simplifies a complex social process. As one HIV researcher put it,‘sexuality and drug use are complicated behaviours, deeply rooted in cultural, social, economic and political ground’ (Freudenberg 1990, p. 591). Another HIV activist/researcher, Bruce Parnell (1996 a & b), articulated the problem more arrestingly. We must, he said, acknowledge the tension in all gay men, between their rational understanding that unprotected anal sex can lead to HIV transmission, and their desire for this ‘warm, moist and intensely human’ experience. Educational programs that simply focus on the mechanics of safe sex, whether it be condoms themselves or negotiating their use, suppress this tension. The result is that the tension is buried, and men practice unsafe sex anyway, some frequently, others less frequently, but all of them, probably, sometime.

Only by reversing this suppressed tension, Parnell argued, by surfacing and discussing the conflict between reason and desire in gay men, could real education take place. To achieve this, HIV educators need to use dialogue, not teaching. Educators should see themselves not as experts bringing answers but as a partner who seeks to act as a catalyst, prompting and facilitating discussions which will enable gay men to explore their own experiences, learn from them and make more informed choices.

In taking this position, Parnell and other HIV educators aligned themselves, often unknowingly, with adult education forms and traditions that contributors to this book discuss at length. But for too long, too many practitioners and scholars have failed to grasp the complex, contextual and often contested nature of adult education and learning. As a professional field, adult education and training has concentrated on developing practitioners’ core skills (teaching/group facilitation, program development) and their knowledge of the psychology of adult learners. As the field has developed, specialist knowledge-bases have emerged:vocational education, human resource development, distance education, radical and popular education, organisational learning, public education. Some attention has also been paid to the history, philosophy and political economy of adult education, and central issues like research, policy and equity.

All these issues are important and are discussed in this book. But adult education, as a profession, a field of study and a social movement could contribute much more. The chapters in this book address aspects of this larger contribution. But first I need to say something about the book’s conceptual framework.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Because it treats such a diverse and complex field of human activity, this book needs an organising principle—a coherent conceptual framework.

Practice and theory

I will begin with the distinction between theory and practice. Adult educators do things, and they think about them. When they do things they are engaged in practice; when they are thinking about their practice they are reflecting and theorising.

Theory (systematic thought) and practice (systematic action) are bound up together. One cannot exist without the other. But practitioners do not always act and think systematically. They often act and think rigidly and dogmatically. It is common, for example, for adult educators to have set value positions on teaching and favourite bundles of techniques, often acquired early in their careers and never subjected to rigorous evaluation. An important goal of this book is to encourage adult educators and trainers to critically examine their practice and theory, and to develop frameworks for understanding and acting on their work. Readers will be encouraged to reflect on practice situations, and to theorise.

To theorise is to attempt to make connections between variables, to explain outcomes, and to predict what will happen if particular courses of action are taken in the future. Theorising involves the application of concepts (i.e. systematic ideas) to experience. We can theorise well or badly—in ways that illuminate our experience and help us to act more effectively, or in ways that obscure connections and outcomes and lock us into ineffective action.

FRAMEWORKS

Each of us has a cognitive framework through which we understand the world. In our everyday lives we are bombarded with sense impressions. Our frameworks are filters which allow us to make sense of what we experience. They develop over the years:they change, or should change, as we have new experiences. Frameworks are made up of analytical constructs that help us summarise and systematise experience.

Developing your framework

To become more effective adult educators and trainers, we need to become more aware of and systematically develop our theoretical frameworks, the ways in which we understand and explain our work. We are usually so busy getting on with the job that we don’t have time to look at our theories. We need to give ourselves time to do this—to think creatively. We need to seek out and use concepts and theories that strengthen our practice. We also need to identify and allow for our stereotypes and prejudices.

Figure 1.1: A framework for analysing adult education and training

Building a framework is a lifetime job. Because the world is so complex, no-one is ever able to say she/he understands it all. But some frameworks are more useful—and ethical—than others.

A framework for analysing adult education

To be useful, a framework should be comprehensive and rigorous.

Our work is complex. In any situation or context that we work in we are operating at a number of levels at once. First, there are our own feelings and thoughts. Then there are our most intense and immediate interpersonal relations: how we get on with those with whom we live and work. There is also the structure and culture of the institution and/or community in which we work. Then there is the social dimension, the broader economic, political and cultural context of our work. Finally, there is the question of how things got to be the way they are. Here we are talking about the historical dimension.

If we are going to act effectively, we need to be aware of each of these levels or dimensions. But there is another issue: Why are we acting? According to what values? An important assumption of this framework, and of this book, is that anything educators do should be grounded in their values and based on the deepest possible understanding of the context of their work.

We should also act strategically. We should think of the whole campaign and the long-term goals, and ways of attaining them.

We should be technically proficient, too. Technique is important. We need to be sure of our proficiency, particularly in the core adult educator skills of teaching and group work, and program development.

FORMAL AND INFORMAL THEORY

It is useful to distinguish between formal and informal theory. Formal theory is ‘organised (and) codified bodies of knowledge—embodied in disciplines and expressed in academic discourse’. Informal theory is the understanding that emerges from and guides practice (Usher 1987: 28–9).

As Usher (1989:72) points out,‘theory cannot tell us how to practice … Most skilled activity does not involve the conscious application of principles … [it involves] such things as attending and being sensitive to the situation, anticipating [and] making ad hoc decisions, none of which would be possible if we had to stop and find the appropriate theory before we acted. The question for the practitioner is not “what rules should I apply”but “how ought I to act in this particular situation”’ (Usher & Bryant 1989: 82). Theorising about adult education should therefore be grounded in an understanding of practice and of how adult educators think about their practice (i.e. their informal theories). These informal theories should be tested and reviewed through formal theory. In this way formal theory can challenge and deepen the commonsense understandings we draw from our everyday work experience.

The formal/informal theory distinction can be augmented by the notions of tacit knowledge and reflection. Polanyi argues that some things we ‘just know’:we have knowledge, which we use, but we do not know it as knowledge; it is buried, unarticulated, implicit. Polanyi, and others, maintain that it is both possible and useful to make tacit knowledge explicit (Grundy 1987: 28–9). Through reflection, we can become aware of our implicit knowledge, our informal theories (Schön 1983; Boud, Keogh & Walker 1985). We can then analyse these understandings and theories and modify and expand on them through reading, discussion and further reflection.

The notion of informal theory connects with Schön’s (1983) concept of ‘reflection-in-action’. S...