On April 23rd, the Study Support and the Library Teams read and discussed a chapter on Jarvis’s (2012) book on the topic of Adult Education and Life-Long Learning. The author focuses on 6 20th-century authors in the field of Adult Education, the first and the one most of the discussion revolved around, being Paulo Freire.

Another point of discussion this week was an Interview Freire gave in 1996 on the topics of Tolerance and Critical Thinking (discussing language, ideology and power).

View Full Discussion Video Here 

The article can be quite a challenging read, especially for those without the background in education, or adult education, mainly due to its nature as a Literature Review and the way it has chosen to present information based on authors. However, a few interesting points of discussion were raised and the main ones can be seen below:

Language, Power and Identity (Freire)

• The idea that the dominant “cultivated” language is a social, political construct (rather than an inherently lingustic determination).
• The duty the educator has to provide students access to the dominant (in our case the academic) variant while at the same time recognising that the student’s variant is beautiful and acceptable (in a given context)
• The importance of tolerance when dealing with the other (other nationality, other ethnicity)
• The need to have a conversation with students about language, about meaning, about differences in cultures and how these end up translating in  written expression
• The fact that English is a reader-centered language and the implications that has in terms of what conventions writers need to follow.
• A lack of understanding of this dominant/academic variant may lead students to a)go around in circles, rather than develop an idea and then proceed to another; b)use a thesaurus in an attempt to sound “sophisticated”
• “Education as our practice of Freedom”
• Freire’s Marxist view and its more direct application in scenarios where education is a gate-keeper to success, where the divide between “the have’s” and “the have not’s” is less blurred, or where people do not feel represented in the education they receive (such as Indigenous Peoples historically in Australia)
• How to privilege difference over deficit (acknowledging students’ differences and respecting different variants when introducing the dominant one)

Nine Phases in Instruction (Gagne’s Model)

• A good model to have in mind when designing a lesson

1.  gaining attention;
2. informing the learner of the objectives;
3. stimulating recall of prerequisite learnings;
4. presenting the stimulus material;
5. providing learning guidance;
6. eliciting the performance;
7. providing feedback about performance correctness;
8. assessing the performance;
9. enhancing retention and transfer (as cited in Jarvis, 2012, p.102)

• The differences in what “previous learning”  different students have and the importance of acknowledging their individual previous learning rather than assuming they have none. This is important for adult learners to feel their identity is being respected and a more “tolerant” approach to introducing a different/dominant variant.

Feel free to add any comments on how this discussion has impacted your teaching or how these authors relate to your practice.