Reflections on Adult Learners of Language and Literacy English C0865

            Adult Learners of Language and Literacy provided the fourth cornerstone of my foundation in literacy and language studies. Most significantly, I now have a deeper respect for adult learners. Who knew there was even a word for their learning needs: androgogy? Still, I quibble a bit with some of the features that are said to distinguish adult learning from childhood learning, though, since I believe the best teaching of younger people also engages their need to know why they’re learning something, their capacity for self-direction, and their connections to the real world.

Reading Brief Guide for Teaching Adult Learners, Third Update on Adult Learning Theory, and Lives on the Boundary gave me a more well-rounded picture of who comes to education late and why. One of the more personally valuable discussions in class was whether teachers should call their adult students “kids,” even in private. I argued for, as a measure of affection. The general consensus was that it is disrespectful. Later, I connected the conversation to my relationship with my own children, now in their twenties. I am transitioning from seeing them as children to viewing them as adults, and saw this conversation as part of that process. Maybe soon I won’t even be tempted to think of them as “kids.”

I got fired up with all the discussion about community colleges and their burdens. I had always had this area of the academic world in my peripheral vision as a place where I might some day work, partly because I am moved by people who are working toward a better life, especially through education. Wynne Ferdinand’s visit and the readings she suggested, along with Mike Rose’s writings, were a wonderful introduction to some of the issues in this field. I do love a good fight and think I may someday join in the battle to strengthen schools like these.

I struggled with Paulo Freire, both because of the dense, philosophical language and thought of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but also because of some of his Marxist-influenced ideas. As I wrote somewhat in my blog, I have never been comfortable with orthodoxies of any kind, whether from the left or the right, and have personal experience with collective action that became oppressive. That said, I continuously see Freire’s ideas reflected in the collaborative structure of activity in every area of contemporary life, from schools to the workplace, even to family structure. Perhaps it is just the zeitgeist, but Freire’s ideas give it some philosophical heft. I would have liked to spend more time in class discussing these notions, though I can see that we had so much to cover it would have been very hard to do. I can see how a course could spend an entire class dealing with just a chapter or two in order to outline his global view and then chart its influence.

Similarly, I would have liked a deeper dive into transformative learning, specifically, what does it look like in practice and how do we know when it has occurred. Can you call learning transformative if only your meaning schemes or psychological self-understanding have changed but not your global perspective? In writing my essay, I came across one scholar who admitted that the latter happens rarely. So how do we measure the intervening steps.

Ways with Words was a gem, offering terrific insight into language in the classroom. The ethnographic lens through which Shirley Brice Heath viewed teachers and students offers important guidelines, especially in diverse communities.

Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives is the most important text I have read on literacy itself, and Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age added some additional understanding. Brandt’s style was more readable and made better connections to her subjects as characters. Selfe and Hawisher’s, as I wrote in my book review, offered a more derivative and redundant text, but it linked digital technology to literacy in important ways.

While I work in a team-based environment that often requires the skills of group therapy, my two group projects for this class were the first I have been involved with in a classroom. (I did one with a single partner in my other class this semester as well.) All of these projects made me nervous, but they got successively easier. I was very glad to have the opportunity to grapple with the Prezi for our final presentation, and feel it is one very concrete outcome of this class. I enjoy translating abstract ideas into more accessible formats, as one does in a live presentation (or a TV newscast for that matter) and feel it is an important contemporary skill. I look forward to taking Digital Literacy in the fall and possibly researching these ideas more. I’m particularly interested in reading more from Gunther Kress, a member of the New London Group, who wrote about what he calls the “turn to the visual.”

I am very glad to have taken this course and believe I grew a lot because of it. After two semesters of graduate study now, I am happy to say I can look back and see a solid foundation for moving ahead.