Psychology and Adult Learning

The Role of Theory in Informing Practice

Mark Tennant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429662850
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The fourth edition of Psychology and Adult Learning has been thoroughly updated to encompass shifts in the concerns of adult educators as they respond to changing global social and economic issues. It examines the role of psychology in informing adult education practice and explores the seminal traditions of key psychological theories as well as discussing issues and problems in applying them to an understanding of adult learning and development.

Providing a thoughtful and accessible approach to understanding self and personal change in adult education, and with a new emphasis on diversity, this new edition has been revised and updated in light of the impact of globalising processes, the emphasis on diversity among educators, developments in cognitive neuroscience, the impact of social media, and the theoretical move away from 'grand theory'. It examines the formation of identities, and places increased emphasis on how a conception of selfhood lies at the heart of teaching adults. Considering adult learning in a variety of contexts, topics covered include:

• Humanistic psychology

• Selfhood in the adult years

• The relevance of neuroscience

• Adult intelligence and cognition

• Behaviourism

• Group learning

• Transformative learning

Psychology and Adult Learning examines the psychological dimension of adult education work by analysing and critiquing key psychological theories that have informed our understanding. It is essential reading for all those who seek a critical account of how psychology informs contemporary adult education theory and practice.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The interest in adult learning stems primarily from the field of adult education rather than psychology. While psychological research and enquiry has informed some of the theoretical and practical issues in the field, academics and practitioners have equally drawn on social theory, philosophy, and research specifically targeting the practices and concerns of adult educators. Typically, the literature on adult learning is applied to the design and delivery of adult education in a variety of formal, informal, and non-formal contexts. These contexts include adults learning in community settings, health education, higher education, migrant and refugee education, literacy and numeracy education, vocational education, college preparation, management education, training and human resource development, workplace education, parent education, prison education, race relations, personal development, and where learning is a component of activist engagement in social issues (see Knox et al., 2018 for a contemporary account). While the treatment of major areas below focuses on adult learning in a general sense, adult learning should not be seen as disembodied from its context (see also Hunt and West, 2009).

Adult education was historically a social movement in its own right, but nowadays adult education, or lifelong education, is broadly accepted as a necessary part of the contemporary world of changing technology, workplace practices, and life trajectories. The historical social movement ethos of adult education was driven by a liberal humanist concern with the welfare of citizens and the maintenance of a civil democratic society. This liberal humanist tradition is evident in the various attempts to explicate adult learning. In this tradition, the aim of education is to cultivate autonomous, independent, rational and coherent selves who have a sense of social responsibility. But there is also a radical tradition in adult education – one which is associated with political action for social justice and social change. This has also had an impact on our understanding of adult learning. In this tradition the aim of education is to cultivate critical awareness, group participation, and action for social justice. These two traditions formulate different questions about adult learning and develop very different pedagogical approaches.

Existing approaches to understanding adult learning generally fall within one of three broad types. The first type seeks to provide a balanced overview of psychological, sociological, and philosophical theory and research together with an assessment of its relevance to adult education (e.g. Cross, 1981; Long, 1983; Candy, 1991; Rogers, 2002; Merriam et al., 2007; Merriam and Bierema, 2014). The emphasis is generally pragmatic; a description of various aspects of psychology is developed into an eclectic understanding of how adults best learn; this may be followed by a tentative list of principles to be adopted or procedures to be employed when teaching adults. There will usually be some comments about the conceptual ambiguities of a theory or the difficulties in verifying a particular research finding, but these are often parenthetical comments, set aside from the thrust of the text.

A second type of approach to understanding adult learning is one which has a clearly articulated thesis and which uses the literature to support the thesis being proposed (e.g. Tough, 1979, 1982; Knowles, 1984, 1990; Mezirow, 2000; Illeris, 2002; Teal et al., 2015; Fleming, 2019). Typically there is an attempt to identify and draw upon a selected set of psychological, sociological, and philosophical concepts and principles and thereby develop a programmatic (and sometimes prescriptive) statement about adult teaching and learning.

With respect to the psychological dimension (which is the principal concern of this book), neither of the above approaches leads to a critical understanding of the theories in question. This is understandable, because when the agenda is clearly ‘adult learning’ rather than ‘psychology’, it appears cumbersome and unnecessary to address the conceptual and methodological problems of psychological theory and research. Nevertheless, failure to do so will mean that psychology will continue to be used in an uncritical way to support the normative rhetoric of adult education.

A third approach takes as its point of departure a critical analysis of theory and research in adult education and develops from this a view about adult teaching and learning (e.g. Griffin, 1983; Hart, 1990; Collins, 1991; Brookfield, 1995; Jarvis, 2010). To date, instances of this type have typically drawn upon a range of disciplines, such as sociology, history, educational theory, and, of course, psychology. My aim in writing this book is to incorporate the spirit of this approach through adopting a critical posture towards selected ‘foundational’ psychological theories and research findings, the purpose being to encourage teachers of adults to approach their practice with a more critical lens.

Jerome Bruner in his Acts of Meaning (1990) argues that contemporary psychology has become fragmented, that it has lost touch with the broader intellectual community, and that it needs to refocus on the great psychological questions once again: ‘questions about the nature of mind and its processes, questions about how we construct our meanings and our realities, questions about the shaping of mind by history and culture’ (p. xi). Once psychology addresses meaning as a central issue, it invariably concerns itself with culture: ‘A cultural psychology, almost by definition, will not be preoccupied with “behavior” but with “action” … and more specifically, with situated action, action situated in a cultural setting, and in the mutually interacting intentional states of the participants’ (p. 19). As such psychology will need to ally itself once again with the interpretive disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, such as philosophy, history, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. Bruner’s view was quite prescient, as demonstrated by a citation analysis of key journals in the period 2006–2014 that indicates the strength of sociocultural traditions across a range of theoretical positions (Nylander et al., 2018). Instead of the positivist concerns with identifying cause–effect relationships, prediction and control, and the search for universal ‘culture-free’ aspects of the person, a cultural psychology embraces culture and the quest for meaning within culture as the key to understanding human action:

A cultural psychology is an interpretive psychology, in much the same sense that history and anthropology and linguistics are interpretive disciplines. … It seeks out the rules that human beings bring to bear in creating meanings in cultural contexts. These contexts are always contexts of practice.

(p. 118)

It is this view of psychology that I believe can appropriately inform adult education practice. As foregrounded in the Preface, one aim of this book is to pick up shifts in contemporary society and academic thinking in so far as they are relevant to psychology and adult learning. A key feature of the shifts identified is ‘change and uncertainty’. But what has this to do with adult learning? Edwards and Clarke (2002) provide some guidance on this:

change and adaptation to change have become watchwords of policy, including educational policy. Many such characterizations incorporate a view that contemporary change processes require greater reflexivity by individuals, organizations, and societies and that this is achieved through learning … it is through self and social questioning (reflexivity) that people are able to engage with and (en) counter – be affected by but also affect – contemporary uncertainties.

(Edwards and Clarke, 2002: 526–7)

On this account, negotiating one’s way in the contemporary world requires the capacity to develop and sustain reflexivity, broadly conceived as a critical awareness of the assumptions that underlie practice. Similarly, the emergence of diversity as a key issue in educational practice at all levels demands that educators have a sensibility to the variety of identities among learners. This too requires attention to the assumptions underlying practice. No longer can teaching and learning be seen as transcending ‘place, people, time, and context’ (Gay, 2018: 29)

In the chapters which follow, then, I aim to provide a critical account of those psychological theories which have informed contemporary adult education theory and practice. Each theory or body of research is treated independently, in a separate chapter, using two guiding principles. First, there is an attempt to provide a balance of description, critique and comments on each theory’s influence, potential or actual, on adult education. As far as possible I have limited this process to those aspects of each theory which are pertinent to the issues and concerns of adult educators. Second, there is an emphasis on understanding self-formation throughout the lifespan. The reason for this is that the very notion of ‘adult education’ as a separate area of enquiry implies that a distinction should be made between adults and children. Moreover, it implies that self-development and change is a feature of adult life and that education has a continuing role to play in the lives of all adults.

In developing a critique of each theory I have been mindful of Broughton’s (1981: 81) distinction between different types and levels of critique. In summary these are:

1. Theoretical critique, where conceptual weaknesses and internal contradictions within the theory are identified.
2. Empirical critique, where the adequacy of the theory is examined in the light of the evidence.
3. Practical critique, where the form, purpose, and success of the practices promoted by the theory are assessed.
4. Ideological critique, where the sociological, historical, and political origins, nature, and consequences of the theory are analysed and evaluated.

An exhaustive critical analysis of a given theory would require all four levels of critique. However, in this book there is a mix of levels both within and between the chapters. The aim is not to be exhaustive, but to be selective and for each chapter to apply only that level of critique which is relevant to adult teaching and learning.

In spite of this apparent ‘ad hoc’ approach there is a unifying theme which persists throughout the text and which provides a framework linking the different chapters. This theme concerns the nature of the relationship between the person and the social environment.

It is useful to think of the various psychological theories addressed in the texts deriving from one of two broad perspectives: these depend on whether they take the person or the social environment as their point of departure. Those theories which emphasise the primacy of the person have a tendency to explain learning and development in terms of the internal make-up of the person. Thus the person is regarded as an entity having some objective form which it is the psychologist’s task to discover, describe, and explain. This assumption implies that the person has an integrity or autonomous dynamic which makes it largely independent of the social environment. In contrast, theories which emphasise the primacy of the social environment have a tendency to explain learning and development in terms of the external forces impinging on the person. On this account the person is reduced to the dependent position, implying that the person can be explained and understood as a product of social influences, at least in all important respects.

This of course is an over-simplification and most theories admit both internal and external influences on learning and development. But nevertheless, an emphasis on one or the other term of the ‘person–social environment’ relation is nearly always apparent. Within the person perspective there is a tradition of research which focuses on emotional development. In this tradition, the emphasis is on how our concept of self, and the conflicts within it, emerges and develops as we proceed through the life course. The groundwork in this tradition can be traced to the humanistic psychology of Rogers and Maslow (Chapter 2), or to the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and its subsequent developments (Chapter 3). Many of the later theories of adult psychological development borrow from both the psychoanalytic and humanistic traditions (e.g. Loevinger, Gould, Levinson, Vaillant, Neugarten, Lowenthal). Adult educators have shown considerable interest in this research (e.g. see Merriam et al., 2007), mainly because it offers the prospect of providing a theoretical and research base for adult teaching and learning (Chapter 4). In particular, it provides us with a model of the end point of development, the ‘fully functioning person’ – the autonomous, independent, and integrated adult personality – from which is derived a view about how adults learn best at various stages and phases of the life cycle (see Weathersby, 1981; Merriam and Clark, 1991; Tennant and Pogson, 1995). The growing research in neuroscience can also be included within the person perspective. In particular, educational neuroscience is a burgeoning area that focuses on the translation of neuroscientific findings into educational policy and practice (Chapter 5). Another area within the person perspective is concerned with the person’s intellectual and cognitive capacities. Adult educators are interested in the extent to which intelligence and cognitive capacities shift over the lifespan the relevance of findings to understanding the constrains on adult learning. Increasingly, however, there has been a reconceptualisation of intelligence as practical and multiple, and situated in particular contexts (Chapter 6).

The ‘social environment’ perspective encompasses a diverse range of theories and approaches. One class of approaches postulates a mechanistic relationship between the person and social forces. On this account the person is a passive receiver of behaviours, roles, attitudes, and values which are shaped and maintained by the social environment through rewards an...