Mobile Devices in Education

With a Professional Learning Session coming on Monday in which I will be facilitating activities about creating digital learning experiences for students, I wanted to relay some information produced by Malcolm Knowles, Stephen Brookfield and Jack Mezirow in the study of andragogy.  I will try to weave some of their ideas together.  My next post will display how I plan to integrate their beliefs into the professional learning of the staff I will work with tomorrow.

Malcolm Knowles

Malcolm Knowles began where few in the educational field had trodden when he began to conceptualize his theory of andragogy in the 1950s.  His belief that adult learners were inherently different than child learners and his theories surrounding that belief have informed much of the research surrounding andragogy to this day.  Knowles’ five assumptions about adult learners seem simple in some respects, but only because so much of our modern concepts of adult learning are built on and presuppose the work of Knowles.  If we plan learning activities for adults which do not consider Self-Concept, Experience, Readiness to Learn, Orientation to Learning, and Motivation to Learn (Knowles, 1984) we are immediately falling short of our responsibility.

Also of note in Malcolm Knowles’ work, is the importance of his work on informal adult education, and how it has informed even formal roles within the educational community in modern times.  Many of the outcomes present in now formalized documents for continual professional improvement can be linked to outcomes for adult learning developed in Knowles’ book Informal Adult Education (1950):

• Adults should acquire a mature understanding of themselves.
• Adults should develop an attitude of acceptance, love and respect toward others.
• Adults should develop a dynamic attitude toward life.
• Adults should learn to react to the causes, not the symptoms, of behavior.
• Adults should acquire the skills necessary to achieve the potentials of their personalities.
• Adults should understand the essential values in the capital of human experience.
• Adults should understand their society and should be skillful in directing social change

While the responsibility for achieving these outcomes of learning lies in the individual learner in Knowles’ theory of informal education, it seems logical that adult learners will gain much more from their professional learning if we can provide materials as presenters that facilitate interaction with these outcomes.

Stephen Brookfield

What Stephen Brookfield has brought to the research is a clarification and practical application of the ideas Knowles’ had developed, with specific insight into the realities of adult education that Knowles did not explicate nearly as thoroughly in his theoretical discussions.  Brookfield tries to break away from the traditional “myths” of adult education that it is, “inherently joyful, that adults are innately self-directed learners, that good educational practice always meets the needs articulated by learners themselves and that there is a uniquely adult learning process as well as a uniquely adult form of practice.” (Brookfield, 1995)

What Brookfield puts forward in his overview of adult learning, is four major areas of research in the post-war study of adult learning.  These four areas include: Self-Directed Learning, Critical Reflection, Experiential Learning and Learning to Learn.  In contrast to the work of Knowles, these areas of research have links to the teaching of children as well, and Brookfield makes no attempt to disassociate his theory from the teaching of children.  Instead, he develops his ideas to display how these research areas have social and political implications for adults, that are minimized or less apparent in child learning.

• Self-Directed Learning – There may be a political dimension to self-directed learning, as often self-directed projects are serendipitous to larger overall goals and initiatives of those in authority roles over the adult.  In addition, Brookfield notes that research is needed into the roles of assessing effective adult learning, as even the assessments may result in a loss of autonomy for the adult learner in choosing and engaging in learning.
• Critical Reflection – This is an area in which Brookfield devotes a great deal of effort, as the conceptualization of “Critical Reflection” in adult learning may be wrongfully seen as reflecting in a negative way an individual’s learning or practice.  Brookfield offers this explanation, “As an idea critical reflection focuses on three interrelated processes; (1) the process by which adults question and then replace or reframe an assumption that up to that point has been uncritically accepted as representing commonsense wisdom, (2) the process through which adults take alternative perspective on previously taken for granted ideas, actions, forms of reasoning and ideologies, and (3) the process by which adults come to recognize the hegemonic aspects of dominant cultural values and to understand how self-evident renderings of the ‘natural’ state of the world actually bolster the power and self-interest of unrepresentative minorities.”  Unfortunately, because this self-reflective process is steeped in the language of the psychoanalytic tradition, it can be a difficult area for educators to gain insight readily.
• Experiential Learning – Brookfield believes that learning from practical experience is an essential component of effective adult learning. However, he does note two pitfalls of exclusive reliance on experiential learning: First, learners must realize that we do not objectively reflect on experience, and that our learning is still framed by contextual and historical perspectives; Second, that the richness of the learning is not directly linked to the quantity or length of experiences reflected upon.  We must critically affirm the experiences of adult learners to ensure that the learning is not based on a romanticized or idealized version of the experience.
• Learning to Learn – This concept functions in some ways as a catch-all term for many of the processes adults undertake to understand their learning styles and approaches.  While the concept of learning to learn has suffered from a lack of formal study in adult education, Brookfield contends that it is an essential component of adult education, and should be seen as part of a lifelong learning strategy as opposed to something to be taught to children in school. It can also be seen as the area of research that can have the broadest impact on adult lives outside of academic boundaries, as it can inform many of the activities adults are involved in daily. (Brookfield, 1995)

Brookfield goes on in his overview to discuss emerging trends as of his writing.  From these emerging trends, the concept of practical theorizing seems particularly relevant to professional learning today, as it is based on the learner’s careful consideration of their experience and informal theories that guide their practice.  The process by which practical theorizing is borne out of critical reflection, is the sharing of the theory with colleagues leading to refinement of the ideas, and then bending the theory back to their own practice by using at as a lens through which they may assess their teaching.  If teachers engage in this process, formal theory can help educators identify areas of their practice that they prior may not have been able to envision or attend to. (Brookfield, 1995)

Jack Mezirow

Jack Mezirow has formalized many of the issues raised with the previous two researchers into functional frameworks of andragogy that also consider ethical questions present when educating adults.  Often we consider ethical questions far more readily when working with youth, as the fiduciary responsibility of the teacher for a student requires that we do so. However, Mezirow raises a number of issues in Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning that he claims are ethical in the role of an adult educator, which include allowing the educator to:

• Intentionally precipitate transformative learning without making sure that the learner fully understands that such transformation may result.
• Present his or her own perspective, which may be unduly influential with the learner.
• Make educational interventions when psychic distortions appear to impede a learner’s progress (even) if the educator is not trained as a psychotherapist. (Mezirow, 1991)

These statements make it apparent that the responsibilities of the educator to an adult learner are significantly different than the responsibilities toward a child learner.  With different responsibilities comes a different methodology to teaching process.  Mezirow also outlines the following 12 goals he created that he believes practitioners of andragogy must fulfill:

1. Progressively decrease the learner’s dependency on the educator.
2. Help the learner understand how to use learning resources, especially the experience of others, including the educator, and how to engage in reciprocal learning relationships.
3. Assist the learner to define his/her learning needs, both in terms of immediate awareness and in terms of understanding the cultural and psychological assumptions influencing his/her perceptions of needs.
4. Assist the learner to assume increasing responsibility for defining learning objectives, planning his/her own learning program, and evaluating progress.
5. Help the learner organize what is to be learned in relationship to his/her current personal problems, concerns, and levels of understanding.
6. Foster learner decision making, select relevant learning experiences that require choosing, expand the learner’s range of options, and facilitate the learner’s taking the perspectives of others who have alternative ways of understanding.
7. Encourage the use of criteria for judging that are increasingly inclusive and differentiating in awareness, self-reflexive and integrative of experience.
8. Foster a self-corrective, reflexive approach to learning – to typifying and labeling, to perspective taking and choosing, and to habits of learning and learning relationships.
9. Facilitate posing and solving of problems, including problems associated with the implementation of individual and collective action, and recognition of the relationship between personal problems and public issues.
10. Reinforce the self-concept of the learner as a learner and doer by providing for progressive mastery and for a supportive climate with feedback to encourage provisional efforts to change and to take risks; by avoiding competitive judgment of performance, and by appropriate use of mutual support groups.
11. Emphasize experiential, participative, and projective instructional methods and use modeling and learning contract where appropriate.
12. Make the moral distinction between helping the learner understand his/her full range of choices and the ways to improve the quality of choosing and encouraging the learner to make a specific choice. (Mezirow, 1991)

In this comprehensive list, we see a synthesis of the ideas of Malcolm Knowles and Stephen Brookfield that were presented earlier.  Mezirow goes back to Knowles’ assertion that adult learning is inherently different than the learning of children, not that the teaching process has to be different, but rather that we must be aware of the different role that we have as educators and the ethical implications of that role.  Also, Knowles outcomes for adult learning are present in the background of Mezirow’s goals, as teachers work toward independent practice, change and reinforcement of learning.   Brookfield’s more practical approach to analysis of adult learning is also represented in Mezirow’s goals, as elements of his four identified research areas in adult learning, self-directed learning, critical reflection, experiential learning, and learning to learn,  are all represented within the goals in Mezirow’s list.

What these three authors represent to me is a tradition and focus on adult learning that is becoming ever more essential today.  Each of these writers speaks of future development in research and learning about adult education, showing a continuing need (as teachers have) to rethink, revise and rework our learning and continue improving for all adult learners.

Have a great day, and thanks for reading!

Sources:

Brookfield, S. (1995) Adult learning: an overview. Retrieved from National-Louis University Website:  http://www3.nl.edu/academics/cas/ace/facultypapers/StephenBrookfield_AdultLearning.cfm?RenderForPrint=1

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. (pp. 196-226). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc.

Smith, M. K. (2002) ‘Malcolm Knowles, informal adult education, self-direction and anadragogy’, the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/thinkers/et-knowl.htm.

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