Jarvis, P. (2010) Adult Education and Lifelong Learning, Chapter 5

2020 Spring Term, GS course Textbook:

Jarvis, P. (2010) Adult Education and Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice, Routledge.

Adult Education and Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice

作者:Jarvis, Peter
2010/02/10

1. Paulo Freire
2. Robert M. Gagné
3. Knud Illeris
4. Malcolm Knowles
5. Jack Mezirow
- transformative
6. Carl Rogers

Chapter 5. Perspectives on Learning Theory

大意「教育学者と学習論」

1. Paulo Freire

His writings epitomized an intellectual movement that developed in Latin America after the second World War, a synthesis of Christianity and Marxism that found its theological fulfilment in liberation theology... From this background it may be seen that at the heart of his educational ideas lay a humanistic conception of people as learners, but also an expectation that once they had actually learned, they should not remain passive but become active participants in the wider world. Hence, for Freire, education could never be a neutral process; it is either designed to facilitate freedom or it is ‘education for domestication’ (Freire 1973c: 79)

... objectified culture is transmitted to the individual through the lifelong process of socialization. Since the culture that was transmitted was foreign to the values of the Brazilian people, who were its recipients, Freire claimed that this was the culture of the colonizers, and implicit in the process was the subordination of the culture of the indigenous people.

Since a construction of reality is contained within language, the common people have a construction of reality imposed upon them that is false to their own heritage. Thus, the idea of a false self-identify emerges, one that perpetually undervalues the indigenous culture, so that native people come to see themselves as subordinate. Hence, the oppressed are imprisoned in a cultural construction of reality that is false to them but one from which it is difficult to escape, since even their language transmits the values that imprison them.

Through the process of literacy education, Freire and his colleagues were able to design experiential situations in which the learners were enabled to reflect upon their own understanding of themselves in their sociocultural milieu. It was this combination of action and reflection that he called praxis (Freire, 1972b:96)... the difference between human beings and the other animals: people are able to process their experiences and reflect upon them. Through the process of reflection, individuals may become conscious of realities other than the one into which they have been socialized. Freire wrote that conscientization ‘is a permanent critical approach to reality in order to discover it and discover the myths that deceive us and help to maintain the oppressing dehumanizing structures’ ... it slightly differently: conscientization ‘implies that in discovering myself oppressed I know that I will be liberated only if I try to transform the oppressing structure in which I find myself’ (pp. 98-99).

Later, he claimed that he no longer used the term ‘conscientization’... still regarded education as ‘the practice of freedom’ through which process learners discover themselves and achieve something more of the fullness of their humanity by acting upon the world to transform it

... if there is not something radical about the educational process, the question needs to be posed as to how it differs from socialization. If education actually provides people with an opportunity to process and to reflect upon their experiences, it must allow them to reach different conclusions about them and to choose whether or not they will behave in a conformist manner... Freire's work is relevant throughout the world, and even more so as globalization is widening the gap between the rich and powerful and the remainder of the world's population.

2. Robert M. Gagné

developed a model for understanding a relationship between learning and instruction.

3. Knud Illeris

... there are four major elements in learning:

the learner (understood from biology, psychology and social science);
the context or external conditions of the learning (learning space, society and objective situation);
the internal process of the learning, which he calls internal conditions (dispositions, life age and subjective experience of the situation); and finally,
the outcomes of the learning, which he regards as applications (pedagogy and learning policy).

Learning occurs at the point of interaction between these basic elements in two processes: the learners and their social situation and an internal process of acquisition and elaboration. Consequently, he sees behaviourist, cognitivist and social learning elements in every human learning process. .. that learning always has three dimensions:

content,knowledge, skills, meaning, and so on
incentive the drivers for learning such as motivation, emotion and volition
interaction the social context of learning and involves action, communication and cooperation.

Illeris's approach is a very neat way of summarizing learning... four types of learning that build upon the mental patterns:

1 cumulative learning;

2 assimilative learning;

3 accommodative learning;

4 transformative learning.

4. Malcolm Knowles

Knowles may almost be regarded as the father of andragogy... defined as ‘the art and science of helping adults learn’ (1980a:43).

Knowles (1978:53–57) initially distinguished sharply between the way in which adults and children learn and claimed that there are four main assumptions that differentiate andragogy from pedagogy:

a change in self-concept, since adults need to be more self-directive;
experience, since mature individuals accumulate an expanding reservoir of experience which becomes an exceedingly rich resource in learning;
readiness to learn, since adults want to learn in the problem areas with which they are confronted and which they regard as relevant;
orientation towards learning; since adults have a problem-centred orientation, they are less likely to be subject centred.
added the motivation to learn (Knowles, 1986:12),
the need to know (Knowles, 1989:83–85).

But other scholars, such as Riesman (1950), have pointed out that some adults are ‘other-directed’, so that when they come to the learning situation they may seek to become dependent upon a teacher. While it may be one of the functions of an adult educator to try to help dependent adults to discover some independence, it must be recognized that this may be a very difficult step for some learners. But the fact that there are other-directed people suggests that Knowles's formulation was a little sweeping in this respect.

... andragogy is not a distinct approach to adult learning, but it does contain some elements of experiential learning theory. (p. 111).

5. Jack Mezirow

Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning (1991) he synthesized much of his earlier work, which he then extended in Learning as Transformation (Mezirow and Associates, 2000).

learning is the process of making meaning from experiences as a result of the learner's previous knowledge, so that learning is a new interpretation of an experience which has not changed greatly in the ensuing years. He went on to show how people make meaning in a variety of different ways and he also analysed the distorted assumptions that stem from prior experiences. Making meaning is an important element in learning, although, as I have pointed out, he restricts it to the cognitive domain, which is a pity since skills, emotions and even the senses are also learned from experience.

Mezirow starts from the assumption that everyone has constructions of reality which are dependent on reinforcement from various sources in the socio-cultural world. He calls these constructions of reality ‘perspectives’ and notes that they are transformed when individuals’ perspectives are not in harmony with their experience – a situation of disjunction. The individual's construction of reality is transformed as a result of reflecting upon experiences and plotting new strategies of living as a result of their assessment of the situation.

In his latest work(Mezirow and Associates, 2000) he also stresses the difference between instrumental and communicative learning.

... definition of learning as ‘the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience as a guide to future action’ focuses on the cognitive domain and is rather narrow. He(Mezirow and Associates, 2000:19) claims that learning occurs in four ways:

elaborating existing frames of reference;
learning new frames of reference;
transforming points of view;
transforming habits of mind.

At the heart of Mezirow's work is meaning, which means that despite his references to emotional intelligence, and even to the spiritual, his is a rather restricted approach to learning.

some differences between Mezirow's work and that of other theorists who consider the wider socio-cultural milieu. Both he and Freire regard education as a liberating force: Freire views it as releasing the individual from the false consciousness in which he has been imprisoned as a result of the dominance of the culture of the colonizers, but Mezirow regards the freedom from a more psychological perspective. Both Freire and Mezirow focus on the social construction of reality and regard learning as a method by which this may be changed.

transformative

Perhaps his focus on adult learning as transformative finds its origins in his idea that there are different levels of reflection, of which he (1981:12–13) specifies seven – some of which he claims are more likely to occur in adulthood:

reflectivity: awareness of specific perception, meaning, behaviour;
affective reflectivity: awareness of how the individual feels about what is being perceived, thought or acted upon;
discriminant reflectivity: assessing the efficacy of perception, etc.;
judgemental reflectivity: making and becoming aware of the value of judgements made;
conceptual reflectivity: assessing the extent to which the concepts employed are adequate for the judgement;
psychic reflectivity: recognition of the habit of making percipient judgements on the basis of limited information;
theoretical reflectivity: awareness of why one set of perspectives is more or less adequate to explain personal experience.

5 to 7, Mezirow maintains, are more likely to occur in adulthood, but this claim might run into the same difficulties that Knowles ran into with his distinction between andragogy and pedagogy. Even so, the final one he regards as quite crucial to perspective transformation.

Indeed, there is a sense in which his approach is very similar to the phenomenological approach... also focuses on disjuncture – that is, if a person's stock of knowledge is inadequate to explain the experience, then the questioning process is reactivated...

Additionally, his emphasis upon reflection is important since he has extended the analysis quite considerably by suggesting different forms.