Category: Adult Education

I’ve began working seriously on the syllabus and activities for my adult education for the fall. This is the first time in eight years that I’m getting back to my roots in adult learning, and preparing for the course is exhilarating and overwhelming at the same time. There’s lots of new literature to try to access and assimilate, much of it from sources outside the United States, and Web 2.0 has opened up avenues for personal learning that we considered science fiction when I was working on my doctorate at Syracuse during the 80’s.

The most overwhelming part is that the course preparation has heightened my perception and now I see adults learning everywhere I go. I stopped for coffee at the B&N yesterday, and the place was as alive with learning as any university library. As I wandered around, I could see people writing small business plans, studying anatomy, pitching Mary Kay franchisees, copying guitar chords and catching up with their magazine reading of every conceivable type. (I even saw a few people buying books.)

I overheard two teachers sitting next to me apparently planning a summer trip to Ireland. They had the Dummies guide, a pile of books and maps that I didn’t recognize, multiple highlighters, various colored post-it notes. From the snippets of conversation it seemed like this was pretty focused on learning more about the country, its history and how that shaped some of the literature that at least one of two taught in class. From my eavesdropping, it sounded like a perfect kind of high level-learning that we want teachers to be engaged in so that they can continue to grow and inspire students to become life-long learners.

I couldn’t be sure, but it also sounded to me like one of the two had to leave late for the trip because she had to take a required education course to complete the 150 points to get her permanent certification. Seemed a shame to me that after 35 years of research on self-directed learning, those of us in the education establishment still haven’t figured out how to credential and certify the authentic, engaged, real-world learning of our teachers. We should be clever enough to come up with a way to award some permanent certification points to an English teacher who self-planned a tour of Irish writers for her summer vacation and spare her another two weeks in school.

There have been a number of thought provoking comments on one of Rachel‘s recent posts on a paper she’s working on that focuses on what it means for a New Media Center or other organization to “have an impact on campus.” Gardner commented on the original post asking:

Hmmm. What *does* it mean to have an impact on campus? …..Does an “teaching outcome” count as a “success’ if a student offers a passionate eulogy at your funeral?

This leads naturally to the need for more discussion on what the purposes (or ends) of our colleges and universities really are. Neil Postman in the End of Education writes that most of what was being discussed about education in the mid-nineties was about mechanics, engineering and technology. The salvation of education requires that we move beyond the technical:

Of course, there are many learnings that are little else but a mechanical skill, and in such cases there may be a best way. But to become a different person because of something you have learned–to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered–that is a different matter. For that to happen, you need a reason. And that is the metaphysical problem I speak of.

It’s been a long time at most universities since we’ve taken that conversation very seriously, as Garnder notes in another post:

The apparatus of higher education has managed to obscure that truth about the professional work we do. We can’t even find that “something much larger” on our own campuses, or reflect it in our curriculum, or foster it in our interaction with colleagues, much less find a way to demonstrate it to the world.

I enjoy the discussion of new technologies and new ways of teaching–both those that use technologies and those that don’t. As a faculty member in the School of Education, I feel an obligation to look beyond the hype and to really understand the fundamental changes that “have an impact” on teachers and their students. For better *and* for worse technology is changing why our students learn, what they learn and how they learn it.

The *why* is a tough, but important issue to keep in front of us. For me, the *why* is more about transforming lives than about covering content or preparing people for jobs. We’ve got lots of talking (blogging) to do to learn how to do that better.