Overview of Adult Learning

Principles and Methods

ASPBAE Leadership Workshop 2008

ASPBAE Facilitation Teams

 Aim
• Our aim is to connect your educational
practice to the theory of adult
education/learning and its underlying
principles
 Who are we?
• We are self-directed learners and come from a
wide range of backgrounds, skills, knowledge and
experiences as adult educators.
• We have very diverse adult learning contexts.
But there are shared themes and regional
challenges.
• We have the commitment towards
transformative and empowering adult learning
practice,with the firm belief in the right for all to
learn, especially the most marginalized sectors.
How do we hope to achieve these?
Part 1: Individual Recall/ Description
- Identify a most significant change story (one activity that you
have facilitated or experienced).
- Recall and briefly describe the issue being addressed
- Summarise the steps involved in achieving this most significant
change
- What were the adult learning activities conducted?
- Who were involved in the change and how did your organisation
contribute to the change?

Part 2: Small Group Sharing

-
Part 3: Plenary Reporting

Part 4: Synthesis and Discussion

 Assumptions
• We have shared understandings of
meanings eg. Adult education, adult
learning, transformative
• Rodikaya “need for conceptual clarification”
and “ has come to acquire a whole array of
of synonyms and near-synonyms and
sometimes overlapping and competing
terms”
• Foley- the radical adult educator
 Jarvis- shifts in emphasis
• Childhood to lifelong learning
• Few to the many
• Education and training to learning
• Learning as a process to learning as an institutional
phenomenon
• Teacher centred to student centred
• Rote learning to reflective learning
• Etc etc
The Four Pillars of Education
The Four Pillars of Education, described in
Chapter 4 of Learning: The Treasure Within, Delor’s Report (1996)

Learning to know
Learning to do
Learning to live together
Learning to be
 Assumptions about adult learners
• Have life experiences and knowledge which are grounded
eg. Classes in Madrasa
• Are relevancy oriented- cultural sensitivity; commonalities
• Are goal oriented- sensitise the decision makers
• Are practical-organic farming demonstration
• Require respectful dialogue- Afghan case study
• Are autonomous and self directed
• Participatory approach- story telling
• We are all learners and we are all educators-equal power
dynamics…hanging question???
 Process of delivery
• Recognitions of different knowledge systems
and learning styles including indigenous
• Acknowledgement of the growing need to
work across traditional disciplinary boundaries
especially given a lifelong focus integrated
and whole
• Co-generation/ co-production of knowledge
which is ongoing
• Sharing and ownership of knowledge
 So what ?
Our insights?
Our learnings?

How do those learnings change our

practise and help transform the lives
and communities in which we work?
Our educational philosophy informs our
educational practice.
 ACTIVIST
I will try
anything once.

There is always a better

way. Let us try this….

EXPERIMENTER OBSERVER
Hmmm.. Let
It worked us wait and
before, it will see…
work again.

THEORIST
 CRITICAL REFLECTION
REFLEXIVE OBSERVATION

ABSTRACT
CONCRETE CONCEPTUALIZATION
EXPERIENCE
GENERALISATION

ACTION
ACTIVE EXPERIMENTATION

Kolb’s Learning Cycle or Single Loop Learning

 METHOD/ PROCESS
Learner-centered
- intentions of learning (accidental, informal, non-formal and formal)
- reasons for learning (occupation, social roles, interests)
- domains of learning (knowledge, skills, attitudes and understandings)
- kinds of learning (instrumental, communicative, emancipatory)
- learning styles (no single way of learning)
- modes of learning (input and action learning)
- begins with the experiences of the learners

We engage the individual as a whole person (thinking, feeling, doing) and not
just the feeling of fun but other emotions (fear, anger, etc)

Collaborative learning (participatory learning)

Transformative learning
Praxis (reflection and action/ theory and practice)
 Additional thoughts
• Our educational philosophy informs our practice,
which in turn helps to develop our philosophy.
• We need to continue to be informed and
responsive to the changing contexts.
• Definitions of adult education and adult learning
are very context-based, but learning the
‘language’ provides you the opportunity to learn
from the practice of others and if not more
important to share your own practice.