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Focus Area Reflection: Adult Education

I have become more and more interested in the dissemination of information – the game of telephone that happens when an instructor presents information and those students present a digested form of the same information to their students. I noticed my interest in adult learning while training new staff on the gallery floor of the alternative learning institutions I worked in. I enjoy the Reggio Emilia concept of the “three teachers” in a child’s life (first the parents, second the teachers and third the space in which learning occurs). I feel rewarded when I help educators make sense of the third teacher. I enjoy using provocation techniques to get educators to learn more about their teaching methods and enhance their own classroom experience. For the first half of my life (reluctantly admitting to myself that I have officially reached middle age), I worked with young children in children’s spaces,  but as I gained more experience and more of an understanding of the best practices and pedagogy, I found myself teaching other educators. I want to get better at providing information to adults, I can’t rely on making songs about the concepts we are learning, not all the time. 

The covid-19 pandemic seriously disturbed my industry. I focused on interactive hands-on learning and that has not been possible for the past 3 years. The covid pandemic also caused significant change in my personality, the fear of being sick has challenged me. I have always been apprehensive about germs but it was manageable as I had learned healthy coping mechanisms, but those no longer work. I am not sure why adult education is what I chose, I am learning a lot of things that I do find relevant, particularly the notion that adult programmers are primarily negotiators. That fact has been life changing. 

The MAIS 601 readings that are relevant to my focus area of adult education are those that dealt with approaching a subject matter from multiple angles and all imaginable perspectives. In the article about reimagining soils (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2019), due to advancements in technology, our view of soil has changed, both metaphorically and physically. We are better able to see soil as a living entity. If we change our perspective of soil from an inanimate object to an animated one, we strengthen our relationship, and relate to it with human-soil affections. This reframing of thought is an important lesson to bring to an adult education class. Included in that lesson is the human connection to a subject matter, the power of emotions to cause adults to care is also important. We revised this concept in the article about the interplay of human and nonhuman realities (Ionescu, A. 2021), there we looked at children’s literature for broader lessons about our own humanity. The stories reframed our understanding of ourselves as people. It used emotional connections for objects around us to reframe what we know about ourselves. These lessons are important in adult education because of the motivational factors that adult learners need. These lessons were particularly important for me and my work with objects, materials, tools and hands-on learning. I have known that presenting a subject from multiple perspectives is important, it is also important to let students figure out for themselves what those multiple perspectives may be and follow their lead. But there is also a lesson here about the subject matter itself, at the beginning of my MAIS journey I had not explored the subject of adult learning from all perspectives. I saw it (and still somewhat see it) as a one way path to corporate education, but I am beginning to appreciate my experience in ways that I hadn’t thought of at the beginning of this journey. My own history is alive with possibilities.

What is the difference between education for adults and adult education? Adult education can be found in human resource training, workplace learning, and professional development. It can be formal, non-formal and informal. Since its inception, adult education had been known as a movement, but now it is more recognized as a process. A process that can support other social movements. Adult education needs to draw from the experience that each learner brings – this is always true in a learning setting, but adults have accumulated a significant amount of life experience that needs to be acknowledged.

Adult education combines theories from a variety of different disciplines. It has foundations in sociology through the work of Emile Durkeheim and his theory on structural functionalism, the work of Mark Weber and his theory on symbolic interactionism and through the work of Karl Marx, who was concerned with “determining the causes of inequality and injustice in a variety of economies” (Woelke, 2017).  There are many grassroots organizations throughout Canada’s history. The need for people to be educated and come together to learn for the betterment of society is admirable. However many of these educational organizations and movements began with racist and colonialist roots. It made me wonder about ethics and how companies evolve from their dark past, do they acknowledge it? Make reparations? How invested in the historical ethics of a company will I need to be?

The article on the role of adult education (Woelke, L, 2017) talked about how there are adults who may find themselves overwhelmed in adult education spaces, bringing with them negative experiences from formal school settings. I feel that there will be a need to reframe an adult’s perspective to not be one that is concerned with attending a classroom, and or interacting with a teacher, but instead to reframe their understanding of education to be that of interacting with knowledge.

Ionescu, A. (2021) The Interplay of Human and Nonhuman Realities in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia. Configurations 29(3) 267-287

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2019) Re-imagining soils: Transforming human-soil affections through science, culture and community. The Sociological Review Monographs, 67(2), 391-407

Woelke, L. (2017, June 6). The role of adult education [Presentation for The University of the Fraser Valley]. Reproduced with permission from the author.

Reflective Analysis on The Interplay of Human and Nunhuman Realities in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia (Ionescu, A. 2010)

I chose to do my reflective analysis on this article because I feel comfortable relating to the concept of objects due to my work in museums, and my time in early childhood learning spaces. My work in museums introduced me to the cultural importance of collecting, and my work with the Reggio Emilia method has led me to an appreciation of material culture both highlighting the importance of aesthetics and presenting the objects in ways that showcase their importance and elevate their significance.  For the rest of the articles we have looked at thus far, my knowledge has been fairly limited, but with this article I am better able to analyze its content and it’s purpose. I was excited to begin my analysis, but I hit my first roadblock: Where is it? I read these articles yesterday, and closed my computer, now I am completely lost – Where are they? They are not in “communication” they are not in “resources”, not in the “audio lectures” I remember it was a downloadable google doc. BUT WHERE?!?!?! After an hour, I found it in the “discussion” section. My nerves and my feelings of defeat led me to an uncontrollable giggle fit the next 45 minutes -recalling what we had learned about how Derrida and other derridians gather information from many different places. Their discombobulated method of presenting information is a reflection of the message itself – information needs to be gathered  and disseminated and understood under different contexts. This was particularly funny, as I just moved – I am exhausted from reorganizing my own life in a new city and my new apartment, tired of looking for the things I need when I need them.  I am having the same struggles with this website and I am wondering if this is a lesson, most of the articles we have looked at in class have been long winded and (thorough? maybe thorough). We discussed how Derrida and derridians slowly meander through a topic. I see the website for this class is much the same and that lesson has made me laugh. 

Back to the article, I am tempted to write about the similarities between the lessons in the article about post humanist my own struggles beginning with the lessons on interspecies empathy (the Academics: my professor and my classmates, and the non academic: Me.) particularly the description of one species having an “(in)capasity for language”. I feel so distant from my classmates that we might as well be different species! The points in this seccion expand to focus on animals and this point no longer applies.. 

The next lesson in the article was about objects having “thing-power” – this  was the most relevant for me and the work that I do. I enjoyed the connections between the mundaneness of the everyday objects, their juxtaposition with the elements and illustrations in the book and their message about our world and our human need to connect to objects, or “non human elements”. The revelation that someone out there is studying material culture and children’s literature in this fashion (its connection to posthumanism) is making me want to explode with joy. My undergrad began in psychology, educational psychology and finally fine arts and art education. I was never able to study the theory of children’s literature, it just did not come up. What a revelation! Prior to reading this article I thought I knew a lot about our human connection to objects, but this is an entry point that I had yet to discover! When I started MAIS I was sure I would walk out with a briefcase in hand and march my way to a corporate office to do institutional learning. Maybe there is more in my future and I don’t have to end one chapter to start a completely different one.  

Ionescu, A. (2021) The Interplay of Human and Nonhuman Realities in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia. Configurations 29(3) 267-287