Module 01
Module 01
Module 1
Learning
Processes
Commonwealth Youth Programme Diploma in Youth Development Work
Commonwealth Secretariat
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London SW1Y 5HX
UNITED KINGDOM
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Our mission is grounded within a rights-based approach, guided by the realities facing young people in the
Commonwealth, and anchored in the belief that young people are:
• a force for peace, democracy, equality and good governance,
• a catalyst for global consensus building, and
• an essential resource for poverty eradication and sustainable development.
Acknowledgments
The Module Writers
Module 1 Dr G Gunawardena – Sri Lanka Module 8 R K Mani – India
Module 2 Lincoln Williams – Jamaica Module 9 Teorongonui Keelan – Aotearoa/New Zealand
Module 3 Louise King – Australia Module 10 Dr P Kumar – India
Module 4 Peta-Anne Baker – Jamaica Module 11 Steven Cordeiro – Australia
Module 5 Dr Mable Milimo – Zambia Module 12 Dr M Macwan’gi – Zambia
Module 6 Morag Humble – Canada Module 13 Paulette Bynoe – Guyana
Module 7 Anso Kellerman – South Africa
The University of Huddersfield for the Curriculum Framework Document and the Editorial work on the
module content – Martin Notley and Lew Owen.
Pan-Commonwealth consultant in development of the CYP Diploma – Martin Notley.
The Commonwealth of Learning for the provision of technical advice and expertise throughout the process.
The CYP Regional Centres and the following institutions for conducting the Regional Reviews:
• CYP Africa Centre; Adult Learning Distance Education Centre, Seychelles; Makerere University, Uganda;
Management Development Institute, The Gambia; Open University of Tanzania; The Namibian College of
Open Learning; National University of Lesotho; University of Abuja, Nigeria; University of Botswana;
University of Ghana; University of Malawi; University of Nairobi, Kenya; University of Sierra Leone,
Fourah Bay College; University of South Africa; Zambia Insurance Business College Trust.
• CYP Asia Centre; Allama Iqbal Open University, Pakistan; Annamalai University, India; Bangladesh Open
University; Indira Gandhi National Open University, India; Open University of Sri Lanka; SNDT Women’s
University, India; Universiti Putra Malaysia.
• CYP Caribbean Centre; University of Guyana; University of the West Indies.
• CPY Pacific Centre; Papua New Guinea Institute of Public Administration; Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology, Australia; Solomon Islands College of Higher Education; University of the South Pacific, Fiji
Islands.
Graphic Art – Decent Typesetting.
Final Module review – Magna Aidoo, Lew Owen, Paulette Bynoe.
Guy Forster for the module cover designs.
Module overview.......................................................... 7
Unit 1: What is learning? ............................................ 19
Unit 2: How do adults learn? ...................................... 53
Unit 3: Education for all ............................................. 75
Unit 4: Informal education ........................................111
Unit 5: What helps and what hinders learning? ..........135
Unit 6: Learning styles ..............................................151
Unit 7: Facilitating adult learning ..............................179
Summary ..................................................................217
Assignments..............................................................229
Readings ...................................................................231
Module overview
Introduction ................................................................. 9
Module learning outcomes ......................................... 10
About this module...................................................... 11
Assessment ................................................................ 13
Learning tips .............................................................. 15
Studying at a distance ................................................. 17
If you need help ......................................................... 18
Module 1: Learning Processes
Introduction
Module overview 9
Commonwealth Youth Programme Diploma in Youth Development Work
Learning outcomes are statements that tell you what knowledge and
skills you will have when you have worked successfully through a
module.
Knowledge
When you have worked through this module you should be able to:
z identify and discuss key theories of learning
z outline the principles of adult learning and the characteristics of
adult learners
z give an overview of important psychological and philosophical
principles relevant to ‘education for all’ and youth development
work
z describe the characteristics of informal education and apply this
knowledge to youth development work
z identify factors that help and factors that hinder people’s learning,
particularly in informal settings
z explain what is meant by ‘experiential learning’.
Skills
When you have worked through this module you should be able to:
z describe your own and other people’s learning style(s) and mode
of intelligence
z devise effective strategies for learning with a range of individuals
and groups in youth development work
z make use of the techniques of informal and experiential learning
in youth development work
z enable other people to make use of these techniques in youth
development work.
10 Module overview
Module 1: Learning Processes
Module overview 11
Commonwealth Youth Programme Diploma in Youth Development Work
This table shows which units cover the different module learning
outcomes.
Knowledge
Skills
12 Module overview
Module 1: Learning Processes
Assessment
Methods
Your work in this module will be assessed in the following three
ways:
z a major research assignment of approximately 1750 words (worth
50 per cent of the final mark)
z a review of the learning journal you keep (worth 20 per cent of
the final mark).
z a written examination set by the institution in which you are
enrolled for this Diploma programme (worth 30 per cent of the
final mark).
Several exercises, some requiring field investigation and action, will
be required in the course of your work on each unit.
There are full details of the assignments at the end of the module.
Note: We recommend that you discuss the study and assessment
requirements with your tutor before you begin work on the module.
You may want to discuss such topics as:
z the learning activities you will undertake on your own
z the learning activities you will undertake as part of a group
z whether it is practical for you to do all of the activities
z the evidence you will produce to prove that you have met the
learning outcomes – for example, learning journal entries, or
activities that prepare for the final assignment
z how to relate the assignment topics to your own context
z when to submit learning journal entries and assignments, and
when you will get feedback.
Learning journal
Educational research has shown that keeping a learning journal is a
valuable strategy to help your learning development. It makes use of
the important faculty of reflecting on your learning, which supports
you in developing a critical understanding of it. The journal is where
you will record your thoughts and feelings as you are learning and
where you will write your responses to the study guide activities. The
journal is worth 20 per cent of the final assessment. Your responses to
Module overview 13
Commonwealth Youth Programme Diploma in Youth Development Work
the self-help questions can also be recorded here if you wish, though
you may use a separate note book if that seems more useful.
Again, we recommend you discuss the learning journal requirements
with your tutor before you begin, including how your learning journal
will be assessed.
Self-test
Take a few minutes to try this self-test. If you think you already have
some of the knowledge or skills covered by this module and answer
‘Yes’ to most of these questions, you may be able to apply for credits
from your learning institution. Talk to your tutor about this.
Note: This is not the full challenge test to be held by your learning
institution for ‘Recognition of Prior Learning’.
Put a tick in the appropriate box in answer to the following questions:
Yes No More
or less
14 Module overview
Module 1: Learning Processes
Yes No More
or less
Learning tips
You may not have studied by distance education before. If so, here
are some guidelines to help you.
Module overview 15
Commonwealth Youth Programme Diploma in Youth Development Work
the order that they occur in the study guide. Make sure that you write
full answers to the activities, or take notes of any discussions.
We recommend that you write your answers in your learning journal
and keep it with your study materials as a record of your work. You
can refer to it whenever you need to remind yourself of what you
have done. The activities may be reflective exercises designed to get
you thinking about aspects of the subject matter, or they may be
practical tasks to undertake on your own or with fellow students.
Answers are not given for the activities. A time is suggested for each
activity (for example, ‘about 20 minutes’). This is just a guide. It does
not include the time you will need to spend on any discussions or
research involved.
The self-help questions are usually more specific and require a brief
written response. The answers are given at the end of each unit. If
you wish, you may also record your answers to the self-help questions
in your learning journal, or you may use a separate notebook.
The case studies give examples, often drawn from real life, to apply
the concepts in the study guide. Often the case studies are used as the
basis for an activity or self-help question.
Readings
There is a section of Readings at the end of the study guide. These
provide additional information or other viewpoints, and relate to
topics in the units. You are expected to read them.
There is a list of references at the end of each unit. This gives details
about books that are referred to in the unit. It may give you ideas for
further reading. You are not expected to read all the books on this list.
Please note: In a few cases full details of publications referred to in
the module have not been provided, as we have been unable to
confirm the details with the original authors.
There is a list of Further Reading at the end of each module. This
includes books and articles referred to in the module and are
suggestions for those who wish to explore topics further. You are
encouraged to read as widely as possible during and after the course,
but you are not expected to read all the books on this list. Module 4
also provides a list of useful websites.
Although there is no set requirement, you should aim to do some
follow-up reading to get alternative viewpoints and approaches. We
suggest you discuss this with your tutor. What is available to you in
libraries? Are there other books of particular interest to you or your
region? Can you use alternative resources, such as newspapers and
the internet?
16 Module overview
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit summary
At the end of each unit there is a list of the main points. Use it to help
you review your learning. Go back if you think you have not covered
something properly.
Icons
In the margins of the Study Guide, you will find these icons that tell
you what to do:
Self-help question
Answer the questions. Suggested answers are provided at the
end of each unit.
Activity
Complete the activity. Activities are often used to encourage
reflective learning and may involve a practical task. Answers are
not provided.
Reading
Read as suggested.
Case study
Read these examples and complete any related self-help
question or activity.
Studying at a distance
Module overview 17
Commonwealth Youth Programme Diploma in Youth Development Work
If you have any difficulties with your studies, contact your local
learning centre or your tutor, who will be able to help you.
Note: You will find more detailed information about learner support
from your learning institution.
We wish you all the best with your studies.
18 Module overview
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit 1: What is
learning?
Unit 1
Unit introduction ....................................................... 21
Unit learning outcomes .............................................. 22
Thinking about learning ............................................. 23
Defining learning ....................................................... 28
Key learning theories.................................................. 41
Unit summary ............................................................ 47
Answers to self-help questions .................................... 48
References.................................................................. 52
Commonwealth Youth Programme Diploma in Youth Development Work
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit introduction
Unit 1
It sets out a basic model of what is currently understood by educators
about how people learn. It introduces you to the main theories of
learning.
The aim of the unit is to start you thinking about learning – as a
learner yourself and as a youth development worker working with
other learners. It starts by asking you to reflect on experiences you
have had of learning, so that you can build up your own definition.
This first unit contains a lot of reading material and ideas that may be
new to you. It is one of the longer units in Module 1. Work through it
gradually. You can return to the readings and ideas as you work
through the rest of Module 1 and the other modules, as your
knowledge and understanding deepen. Don’t forget to use the
glossary for explanations of specialist terms. The self-help questions
and activities in the unit will help you to relate the ideas to your own
work and experience and to discuss them with colleagues and other
learners. The unit will ask you to analyse your own learning
behaviour and that of the young people you know, in the light of your
reading and thinking. Note that you don’t have to remember
everything.
The unit introduces important aspects and key theories of learning,
but it does not aim to give you an in-depth understanding of them.
However, it should help you to construct your own theory of how
people learn. This will act as a framework that you can use
throughout this module, and in your work as a learner and as a
facilitator of educational opportunities for young people.
The field of human learning is so rich and interesting that you will
soon begin to develop your own theories and philosophy of
education. We hope so, because these attributes will help guide your
practice as a youth leader, and help you to develop aims and
objectives for your work.
When you have worked through this unit, you should be able to:
z write your own definition of learning
z describe important elements of a definition of learning
z identify and discuss the main points of some key theories of
learning
z relate what you learn in this unit to your own experiences.
Unit 1
improved ability to tackle problems). An educator or learning
facilitator will be able to observe your change in behaviour – but they
have to work out what has happened in your mind.
Human beings belong to a learning species. It’s almost impossible to
stop people learning, and therefore learning takes place throughout
life, in all sorts of different ways and different contexts. Of course,
what we learn may not always be what we want or need. People can
learn all sorts of behaviour by simply being exposed to situations
where damaging behaviour is normal. Think of teenagers who
acquire bad behaviour in school and refuse to learn useful school
knowledge, in order to be accepted as part of an anti-school peer
group.
Human beings have a huge capacity for learning. However, we use
surprisingly little of the active, intellectual part of our brains. But we
can extend our intellects enormously when we need to. This becomes
clear in disaster situations. For example, when villagers living
peaceful, repetitive lives on the land are forced to deal with the threat
of floods or earthquakes, they have to make extreme adaptations to
meet the challenge of finding food and shelter and reorganising
economic and social life.
For youth development workers, understanding this principle – that
people can extend their capacity for learning when they need to – is
crucial. You may encounter serious problems of community and
environmental breakdown when you are trying to mobilise young
people to utilise their intellectual capacity to solve the problems they
face. Their access to this spare capacity in their brains might be
blocked by previous learning experiences, and by present failure to
open the right intellectual doors. To open these doors, you need to
understand some of the principles of learning that have begun to be
discovered by psychological and sociological research. Above all, you
need to facilitate the growth of their self-confidence, and help them to
understand that they can achieve many intellectual skills relatively
easily.
So what we can find out about how people learn? Have you ever
thought about the question: ‘What is learning?’
By doing or studying research into the nature of learning, we can gain
a better grasp of how to organise the learning experience. It’s
surprisingly hard to define learning, though we can usually describe
the situations in which learning takes place. By thinking about what
happens to us in those situations, we can begin to develop a personal
understanding of the processes of learning. This helps us to observe
whether or not the young people we are working with are actually
learning anything. It’s possible for people to appear as if they are
learning, but in reality their learning may be superficial, so they will
not be able to do anything with it nor build on it.
Over the last 100 years, the subject of how people learn has been
controversial, with different schools of thought struggling to define
the issues. You may meet much intellectual conflict regarding some
of the ideas presented here (particularly if you come from a culture
with different traditions from the contending liberal humanist and
Marxist ideas that underpin this module). Those disagreements are
valuable for increasing understanding, and involving yourself in them
will be good for your own development.
We start our investigation of how people learn by asking you to think
about your own experiences.
Activity 1.1
(about 15 minutes)
1. In your learning journal, write down brief descriptions of
different sorts of examples of learning that you have
experienced, such as learning a physical skill, an aspect of
a school subject, a social skill. Write down as much as you
can about them. Keep working for the whole 15 minutes.
2. Once you have a good list of examples, try to organise
them into groups or types of learning activities.
If you work with a tutorial group, you may want to do this as a
group activity.
Unit 1
Look at the list you prepared in Activity 1.1 and try to write a
definition of learning that covers all the different examples
that you included.
Learning is
...............................................................................................................
...............................................................................................................
...............................................................................................................
...............................................................................................................
The purpose of this question is to let you see that, while you can
usually describe what is happening on the surface of learning
situations, the underlying learning process itself is much harder to
define. However, we can use simple problem-solving techniques to
give us more insight into the nature of the learning process. Read the
following case study about ways of learning, teaching and testing.
Unit 1
z knowledge
z comprehension
z application
z analysis
z synthesis
z evaluation.
So it is important to create effective learning structures, depending on
different kinds of learning and the objectives of learning.
A lot of learning needs to be acquired in ways that will enable you to
build on it in the future, rather than getting stuck with a method that
suits just one situation. Even in many apparently simple, repetitive
skills, there are underlying abilities that could be developed and used
for different, more challenging problems, if you can expose them.
This is important if you are working with young adults. They may
have developed what appear to be very simple skills, such as quick
calculations when selling goods in public – very common among
young street traders in developing countries. However, it could be that
those apparently simple skills involve submerged logical thinking. As
the example of young street traders in Brazil shows later in this unit
(Case study 1.3), youth workers would be able to facilitate the
development of true mathematical abilities if they could recognise
and develop these underlying logical processes.
Youth workers meet many young people who do not have confidence
in their own ability and potential because no one has recognised the
extraordinary range of abilities that they have. Simply by having lived
and survived in the turbulent everyday world, they have considerable
abilities. But they may not have acquired these abilities in such a way
that they can build on them further. So youth workers must facilitate
that building-on process.
In this section you have thought about your own experiences,
formulated your own definition of learning , and begun to look at
levels of learning. In the next section, we will build on that.
Defining learning
There are three self-help activities in this section to help you try out
the ideas.
1 Inner process
Learning is essentially a personal process that takes place in the brain.
It is a process of change in our underlying mental competence which
usually shows itself in aspects of our behavioural performance, such
as the skill to do calculations or cook food. Other people can only be
aware of a change in our inner competence by observing a change in
our behaviour or performance.
For example, they may see that we can make pepper soup faster and it
tastes better than before. Or they can set us more advanced arithmetic
questions and check how quickly and accurately we can do them.
And they can then infer that we must have developed a higher level of
ability in these skills.
Unit 1
need to test it in a range of circumstances. We need to be sure that the
learner understands what makes the behaviour work.
Even apparently simple skills, such as the ability to calculate money
in roadside transactions, are underpinned by complex, abstract
processes (as you will see later in Case study 1.3 about the Brazilian
street traders). So, not everything that is learned will necessarily be
demonstrated in an obvious way.
Motivation to perform is also crucial. For example, young people may
be inhibited from performing by the presence of their peer group,
especially if they believe the others are of socially higher status than
them. Or teenagers may have mastered a school subject but may
choose not to show their skills because they want attention from the
teacher, or because they are hostile towards the school. These are
important external conditions that affect the motivation to perform.
They are primarily social conditions. As a youth development worker,
you need to learn how to create the right social conditions if you are
going to motivate your groups to perform.
When learning is primarily intellectual (in other words, when it leads
to greater knowledge or understanding of something, such as
chemistry or history) other people can only assess that learning when
the learner applies it, by answering examination questions or by
solving intellectual problems in the real world. Intellectual
development will be seen in more sophisticated performance when
discussing or writing about a subject. Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) is
helpful in assessing these things. Assessing the mental competence
underlying this intellectual performance is not simple. You yourself
may well have passed examinations by presenting knowledge that you
have forgotten immediately afterwards, and which had no meaning
for you in the real world. Therefore the knowledge did not lead to a
permanent change in your ability to perform.
3 Change
Most definitions of learning assume that it involves change – the
notion of a more or less permanent change in performance or
behaviour.
Changes in performance or behaviour are not always due to learning,
but to other factors, such as injury or illness; intoxication or fatigue; a
natural developmental response (such as sucking and blinking); or
maturation or growth.
speaking, thinking and acting are part of our society’s elite culture,
then we will readily adapt to the norms of that culture. Any tests
designed by our elite are likely to be relatively easy for us to master.
Where we develop the low-status norms of our society, we have to
make huge adjustments to perform well against elite norms, such as
those tested by IQ tests or university examinations.
Unit 1
This largely non-conscious learning has its dangers. We can become
trapped into incompetence by these ingrained habits when we are
faced by problems that need a fresh approach. We may find that that
we have a rigid ‘mental set’: a way of seeing and dealing with
something that has become fixed in a way that’s hard to change and
that blocks our ability to adapt. As you will see in Case study 1.3, the
skills of the Brazilian street traders in selling food on the streets work
in the trading situation, but they can’t adapt them to school maths,
though they are based on the same principles. These skills have
become mentally fixed around items of food. When the food is not
there, the skills disappear.
This is where the process of conscious learning is so crucial. Like the
stroke patient, we may sometimes need to analyse a skill a bit at a
time into its small building blocks, then to rebuild these blocks, the
sub-routines, of our earlier learning, in order to be able to add on the
new learning. There are several alternative psychological models for
doing this.
4 Inbuilt abilities
It is important for youth development workers to recognise the inbuilt
learning abilities of their groups – to work in harmony with the way
that nature has endowed the human species. The evidence of linguists
such as Pinker, working in the general tradition of Noam Chomsky,
suggests that we are born with a structure in the brain known as the
‘Language Acquisition Device’ (LAD). This automatically
understands and recreates the rules of any language in which it is
immersed, providing that the right conditions are in place. By using
methods derived from this research it is possible for learners to
acquire mastery of a new language extremely quickly (Krashen,
2003). It is accepted among scientists working in this area that the
LAD is found in a structure consisting of several related parts of the
brain next to the motor areas that support spoken language
(Butterworth, 1999).
The best conditions for foreign language learning are normally met in
non-formal situations in childhood. The reasons for this are that:
z children are generally not under pressure to speak in a language
community until the basic rules of that language have been
formed in their minds from listening with understanding;
z this happens simply from exposure to or immersion in the
language, in conditions where they are allowed to concentrate on
the meaning of what is being said, rather than on the form of the
words.
When these conditions are met, the LAD seems able to absorb and
process the grammar and form appropriate grammatical rules.
What young children do naturally has to be carefully constructed
with young adults. This sort of learning has to be adapted to suit
them and their circumstances, and specific learning strategies devised
for specific bodies of learning. We have found, in our own action
research, that these principles that work so well in foreign language
learning, work even better when learners are acquiring new specialist
languages for the sciences and the arts – such as political literacy or
the language of the sociological thinker.
For example, you may be helping a group to set up a small business
enterprise. The learners will have to learn rapidly how to understand
business documents and communicate with funding companies and
other businesses. Think about what you might do to prepare them
quickly for these skills. They need to understand the meaning of what
is being studied. So what ways are there in which you can make
business situations meaningful and realistic when you are delivering
training? They will need lots of exposure to business language and
business communication, both spoken and written, but only when the
meaning is absolutely clear.
This view of language acquisition is very positive for adult learners, if
you can create the right learning conditions, because they have so
much experience on which to draw. This same model has been argued
by Jackendoff (1995) to be applicable to musical learning, social
learning, and artistic learning. Chomsky has argued that we have
inborn, open-ended faculties for acquiring all the main forms of
knowledge that have been developed. Butterworth (1999) describes a
similar model of people’s inborn capacity for mathematical learning.
He calls it ‘our innate Number Module’.
While there has been controversy about what the psychological
processes involved are, the general model is now widely accepted as
being relevant to learning. The model suggests that it is crucial to:
z understand the ideas or the essence of the situations embodied in
the linguistic form. For example, if you understand from
discussion of the real world what a sociological text is really
talking about, then you have no problem in coping with, and
acquiring for your own use, the ‘sociologese’ – the sociological
language registers.
z be exposed to lots of examples of the linguistic or
representational forms in which these ideas are expressed. (For
example, think about arithmetic where you need to work on lots
of examples before the process sticks and becomes a natural part
of your thinking).
Unit 1
non-conscious processes and use them intentionally to accelerate
learning.
The reading that follows and the self-help question will help bring
together the aspects of learning discussed so far, namely:
z inner process
z competence and performance
z change
z inbuilt abilities
z intentional and unintentional learning.
Unit 1
well, but has to learn how to train the kestrel. So he steals a book on
hawking and teaches himself to understand this rather complex,
technical book by using the pictures for understanding and
experimenting with the bird to see if it matches what he thinks he’s
learning. He quickly becomes expert in the language and skills of
hawking, and even delivers a lecture to his classmates on this subject.
This is a big change of social and intellectual skill level for him. The
film was based on a true story about real characters known by the
author, who was then a teacher.
What is crucial here is that Billy crosses the boundary between not
understanding and understanding what’s written in the book because
the book becomes meaningful to him through his involvement with
the hawk. And this meaningfulness is the thing that leads to his
understanding the text. This enables him to build the new knowledge
onto what he already knows, and in the process to increase his
reading skills, which in turn leads to more understanding. The
meaningfulness of the book also sustains his interest and motivation.
Unit 1
on an environmental project.
You now want to move into a phase of the project where the
organisation of work will be used to break down traditional
gender roles and expectations. You hope this will develop new
social relations among the young people, to prepare them for
the changes taking place in their society.
You have decided to start this process by working together to
develop a project plan. You assume that the compulsion to
take on equal gender roles will automatically begin to bring
about the necessary changes in attitude. But what you find is
that the traditional local attitudes strictly separate male and
female roles. The rigid mental sets of the members of your
group means that they find it extremely difficult to conceive
of things in any other way. What can you do about this? Suggest
the first step you would take to start changing roles and
expectations.
Compare your answers with those provided at the end of the
unit.
7 Transfer
Can the learning be applied to a new situation?
For many, this is the final indicator of whether learning has taken
place – application, a high level of learning in Bloom’s taxonomy,
described earlier. This is called ‘transfer of learning’ (or of training).
It represents an important behavioural change that is related to the
learning process.
The following short case study illustrates the problem of transfer. It is
based on a piece of research in Sao Paolo, Brazil, reported by the UK
Open University. It contains an account of a group of street children
who, from the age of eight until late adolescence, sell food in the
streets of Sao Paolo to earn a living.
The self-help question asks you to apply your learning from this unit
to answer the questions.
8 Practice
Driving a car, playing a musical instrument or performing well in
sport require a lot of experience, or practice. Learning theorists not
only emphasise changes in behaviour. They also stress that these
changes are deepened as a result of experience, or practice. To master
arithmetic we need to be using it everyday to solve problems in
shopping, budgeting and so on. And the nature and quality of that
practice is extremely important, as the examples of great performers
(such as sports people) show.
Unit 1
ability. This principle is supported by what research has shown about
the effects of language on learning (Slobin, 1979).
This technique can be applied widely. For essential psychomotor-
based manual skills, such as bricklaying or drilling, the trainer can
make learners direct their efforts much more precisely, improving the
quality of the movements involved, by the use of language. What
seems to happen is that the words, by drawing attention to the
meaning and the detail of what is being done, sharpen the learner’s
perception. That feeds into the psychomotor system, because these
two areas (perceptual and psychomotor) are closely linked in the
brain.
Spectators don’t generally appreciate that a great deal of the skills
used in sport depend on the link between psychomotor and
perceptual schemata in the brain. In other words, much of the process
is intrinsically mental. The great coaches make use of the research in
this area to increase the performance levels of their athletes, often
employing psychologists and psychotherapists as part of practice.
The great tennis champion, Billie-Jean King, is reported to have spent
the days prior to major tennis matches envisaging what might happen
in the game, and talking herself through all the moves she would
make to counter her opponent’s efforts. Of course, she could not
foresee exactly what would happen, but she was presumably able to
develop a complex mental map that underpinned and sharpened her
perceptual and psychomotor schemata. This was complex enough to
pre-alert her to most of her opponent’s moves.
One of the techniques considered particularly useful for beginners in
a sport has been called ‘the inner game’. Here, the learners are
encouraged to observe closely the quality performers whom they
admire. When they practise the sport, they think of themselves as if
they were those players. They will not be able to perform like their
favourites, but they will absorb non-consciously some of the basic
skills necessary for playing the sport. This is what Jackendoff (1995)
is suggesting when he writes about people being born with a mental
acquisition device that enables them to acquire psychomotor skills
efficiently. Many of the young people who become competent
footballers have possibly been doing this non-consciously when
watching matches on television.
Actors and directors often rely on similar techniques to improve the
quality of performance in films and plays. Many of the great
Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s were trained in the ‘Method
Acting’ techniques taught by Lee Strasbourg at the Actors’ Studio in
New York. In this method, which was influenced by the great Russian
director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, actors use techniques that enable
them to live inside the mind of the character they are playing. They
draw on their own deepest emotions and experiences to bring a
character alive in a quasi-real world. It is as if they are ‘taken over’ by
the character. That generates powerful schemata that underpin and
drive the practice of ‘method’ actors, such as Robert de Niro.
Rehearsals then become ‘inner-directed’ by the way the actors
experience the practice situations emotionally and mentally.
Of course, this is only one theatrical tradition in acting and may be in
conflict with your own tradition. But as one way of transforming
young adults, so that they grow in confidence and personality, it is a
very powerful technique. It is a process of transformation observed in
young people who have learned to act in dramas and have then
transferred these understandings and skills into their everyday
behaviour. Of course, successful experience of the performing arts in
any tradition will probably transfer into everyday life at one level or
another.
Activity 1.2
(about 20 minutes)
Go back to Self-help question 1.1, where you wrote your own
definition of learning.
Review your definition in the light of the aspects covered in
this section of the study guide:
z inner process
z competence and performance
z change
z inbuilt abilities
z intentional and unintentional learning
z meaning and understanding
z transfer
z practice.
Now that you have thought about your own experiences of learning
and looked at aspects of learning that need to be considered in
reaching a definition, it is time to consider theories that can help
explain and define learning.
Unit 1
Many theories of learning have evolved as psychologists and others
have tried to account for what happens when learning takes place. In
describing the evolution of learning theories, we could go back as far
as the ancient Greeks.
However, as we explained in the unit introduction, we are not trying
to give you an in-depth understanding of theories of learning, only
introducing you to some of the key concepts. Reading this should
help you to construct your own theory of how people learn, because
this will act as a schema that you can use throughout this module,
and in your work as a learner and as a facilitator of educational
opportunities for young people.
Learning theories alone could be the subject of a complete module.
We will limit our discussion to some of the main theories, those that
have been developed by psychologists, starting at around the late
1800s. An important thing to keep in mind is that the earlier theories
are not necessarily wrong and later theories right, but that
understanding about learning has become more and more complex as
research has grown. There are useful aspects to all of these theories.
Learning theories can be broadly classified as:
z behaviourist
z cognitivist
z or humanistic.
Though the lines separating these types of theories are not always
clear, using them is a useful way for us to begin.
Some of the important points about each theory are summarised
below. These are followed by a reading that examines the theories in
more detail. Then there are activities and self-help questions to help
you explore each theory further or to apply it.
Behaviourist learning
In a behaviourist analysis of learning, the idea is that we learn
primarily by responding to external conditions.
Among human beings, behaviourist learning techniques are usually
based on the principles of operant conditioning. Here, people are
essentially free to choose their behaviours.
Learning methods derived from behaviourist theories tend to be
focused on the change and/or development of specific skills. They are
often involved with social skills and are product/outcome oriented.
They stress external motivation and accountability.
A major limitation of behaviourist learning theory is that it describes
only observable behaviours and insists on ignoring what is taking
place inside the mind of the learner.
Cognitivist learning
Cognitivist theorists want to know more about the processes that go
on in the mind of the learner.
For them, the processes of learning are more important than
behavioural changes. Their work throws some light on what is going
on in the mind of the learner.
In this module, we will be advocating learning methods that, to a
significant degree, derive from the cognitivist view: methods such as
discovery learning, process-oriented learning, relying on internal
motivation, networked learning and student choice. Learners need to
be involved in thinking for themselves, developing tools for acquiring
knowledge, problem solving and organising their knowledge.
In essence, cognitivist theories of learning look at three things:
1 types of learning or knowledge
2 information processing and memory
3 metacognition (awareness of the self as a learner; capacity to
understand and monitor one’s own cognitive processes).
Humanistic learning
The humanistic models of learning are all concerned with the
uniqueness, the individuality and dignity of each learner and the right
to self-determination.
Humanistic theories emphasise:
Unit 1
z the inborn and powerful human desire to learn
z the importance of the educator’s concern for the perceptions,
needs and feelings of the learner,
z the desirability of self-determination: the need for the learner to
have a strong measure of control over the learning process
z the need for the teacher to be a facilitator, rather than an
‘authority’.
The humanistic emphasis is on the development of the social and
emotional self, which is seen as the key supporting framework for
underlying competence.
Activity 1.3
(about 15 minutes)
This activity applies ideas about behaviourist learning.
Write a response to the following questions in your learning
journal.
1 How might you follow Skinner’s lead and use operant
conditioning for improving the social and practical learning
of young people?
2 With what other kinds of learning would the behaviourist
approach be appropriate for youth development work?
If possible, discuss the behaviourist approach with others (co-
workers and /or tutorial group).
Activity 1.4
(about 15 minutes)
If possible, discuss the concepts of information processing and
memory with others (co-workers and/or tutorial group) and
write in your learning journal the ways that you could use
cognitivist concepts to promote learning in your own work.
Self-actualisation
(G
DS
RO
EE
WT
Aesthetic
-N
goodness,beauty
H
TA
truth, justice
NE
ME
Cognitive
ED
knowledge, symmetry
Unit 1
S)
Self-esteem
competence, approval, recognition
(D
EF
S Belongings and love
ED
IC
affiliation, acceptance, affection
NE
IE
NC
SIC
Y
BA
NE
Safety
ED
security, psychological safety
S)
Physiological
food, drink
Activity 1.5
(about 15 minutes)
This activity applies ideas about humanistic learning.
Look at the diagram of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and try to
identify what motivates the majority of young people that you
know. If a person’s basic needs, such as food, shelter and a
safe environment, are not being met, what effect do you think
this will have on their ability to learn? If possible, discuss this
with others (friends, co-workers and/or tutorial group). Write
a response in your learning journal.
In Reading 3 and the related activities you have explored three main
types of learning theories – behaviourist, cognitivist and humanistic.
The last activity in this unit asks you to reflect on how these theories
relate to your own definition of learning, which you drew up at the
start of the unit and reviewed midway through.
Activity 1.6
(about 20 minutes)
Look again at your reviewed definition of learning in your
learning journal entry for Activity 1.2. Add further comments
in the light of what you have now learned. Think about the
following points:
z Has reading about the three key theories changed the way
you define learning? If so, how?
z How do you think you can apply what you have read to
your work with young people? Aim to list at least three new
things you might now try in your work.
Unit summary
Unit 1
definition. These are:
o inner process
o competence and performance
o change
o inbuilt abilities
o intentional and unintentional
o meaning and understanding
o transfer
o practice.
z key learning theories and how they evolved. There are three main
types of theories:
o behaviourist approaches, which see learning in terms of
stimulus and response structures
o cognitivist theories, which are about types of learning,
information processing and memory, and the process of
learning to learn
o humanistic theories, which focus on the individual and the
importance of linking feelings and perceptions to thinking.
z and finally, how your own definition of learning has developed in
the light of what you learned in this unit.
To check how you have got on, look back at the learning outcomes
for this unit and see if you can now do them. When you have done
this, look through your learning journal to remind yourself of what
you have learned and the ideas you have generated.
In the next unit we will look at what is different about adult learning
and at the role of experience in how adults learn – experiential
learning.
There are no known ceilings on human learning for anyone who has
not suffered serious brain damage, and even for those with brain
damage, science is beginning to discover all sorts of new possibilities.
Unit 1
conscious learning, also some unintentional, unconscious elements.
1 and 6 are the most deliberate or intentional.
2 and 4 are very deliberate, but they may depend on a lot of small
unconscious aspects of learning to plough and drive, which have been
absorbed by watching other people, etc.
just what the school method is doing. In that way, they will begin to
be able to bring their intuitive sense of what to do out onto the
surface so that they can observe it and use it in different situations.
The conclusion for the youth development workers is that the people
with whom they will be working are natural creative thinkers. If the
conditions are appropriate, then learners should be capable of
Unit 1
learning almost anything and learning it quickly. Where there are
learning blocks, then those have to be unblocked first, of course.
Bruner (1966) says that slow learners are blocked learners, but once
they are unblocked they can cope as well as anybody else.
The act of putting an idea into words, trying it out and getting
feedback from someone you trust, seems to make that idea
meaningful. That is the first stage of shifting any blocks and getting
the automatic systems moving; it’s also the first stage of exposing the
idea in a way that makes it transferable to other things.
References
Unit 2
Unit introduction ....................................................... 55
Unit learning outcomes .............................................. 55
Adult learning – what’s special? .................................. 56
Experiential learning .................................................. 58
How adults learn best ................................................. 60
Self-directed learning .................................................. 67
Unit summary ............................................................ 71
Answers to self-help questions .................................... 72
References.................................................................. 73
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit introduction
Unit 2
our unique patterns of learning will have become more marked as we
developed into individuals with unique sets of experiences and
attitudes.
This unit will help you to understand how adults learn and the factors
that have to be considered when dealing with adult learners. It builds
on the understanding of learning in general that you developed in
Unit 1.
This unit has a longer activity at the end, involving a meeting and
discussion with a group of young adults from your community.
When you have worked through this unit, you should be able to:
z outline the main principles of adult learning and the
characteristics of adult learners
z explain what is meant by experiential learning and evaluate the
theory against your own experience
z relate ideas about adult learning to the experiences of young
adult learners
z select teaching-learning methods that take into account the
characteristics of adult learners.
Unit 2
breaks it down to its core patterns and reconstructs those in a
simplified, schematic way. He teaches by getting the students to use in
English the basic conversational phrases that they will now learn in
French. He shows them in English how the French say those things,
then word by word he inserts French vocabulary in place of the
English. Eventually he uses a full English sentence, gets them to
translate it into French a word at a time, then a phrase at a time, then
to reassemble it as a whole sentence. He never tells them a phrase or a
pronunciation, but gets them to work it out from what they already
know. The cognitive, problem-solving processes are always uppermost
(‘learning is based on understanding’). At the same time he shows
how much of the French language is actually the same as English (the
two languages have many elements of common ancestry, of course),
just with different pronunciation. All the time, the students are
building on what they already know, a piece at a time.
What his students say is illuminating. The great film director Woody
Allen, who was taught French by Michel in a weekend, says that his
learning was ‘unblocked by the quality of Michel’s relationship with
me’. His adolescent students said: ‘I don’t need to remember the
words – they just pop into my head’; ‘You can see the words’; ‘He
doesn’t make you feel lost; he always takes you back to what you
know’; ‘ Because you say it in English first, you remember each piece
and it’s easy to build up from there’.
How does the Michel Thomas case study compare with any of your
own experiences of adult learning or language learning?
From the point of view of motivation, it’s clear that the learning
process itself provides the motivation. The students can see an
objective they need and want to reach at every point in the process;
that objective is just at the edge of their ability; it stretches them but
doesn’t scare them; they achieve continuous mastery. All this is
clearly a source of intrinsic motivation. But it’s also crucial that the
extrinsic motivation of the human relationships is supportive and
helps build confidence, and that the physical conditions are right. The
students are made to take on the roles, under Michel’s guidance, of
being self-teachers. They are the roles of adults capable of solving
Experiential learning
Unit 2
The very strengths of adult learning groups, the richness and variety
and depth of their experiences, can also present you with problems.
They can be challenging. In fact, you would hope that they will be,
because that is an excellent basis for self-learning. Many adult
learners have developed a strength and confidence from having
entered and survived in the challenging adult world. They may,
however, also have sustained a few scars during that process, from
failures and uncertainties that they faced and perhaps did not manage
to cope with. But these issues can also be the real key to their
development – by your helping them to reflect on and reconstitute
their uncertainties and failures in terms of what can be learned from
them.
These challenges are more complex because adult groups are so
diverse, partly through the range of their age differences, but also due
to differences in their experience of:
z employment/unemployment
z social and economic status
z marital status
z educational level or attainment
z mode of learning and ability to learn (usually preferred learning
styles)
z orientation to learning.
The basis of an experiential approach in youth development projects
is to draw upon the different experiences, knowledge and skills and
hang-ups that adults bring with them. Past experiences provide a
wealth of case studies and examples – especially useful for exploring
and developing members’ attitudes. In building a team your main aim
will be to discover and integrate the individual strengths of each
member. Learn how to use these individual strengths as teaching
resources.
Activity 2.1
(about 20 minutes)
In your learning journal, say what you think about the truth
and practical application of the ten principles identified by
Rogers, measured against your own experience as a learner. If
possible, think of examples when they have been true for you.
(You may find it useful to look back at your response to Activity
1.1 in Unit 1 What is learning?).
So far in this unit, we’ve looked at how adult learning is special, and
particularly at the importance of experience. The next sections
consider what adults need to help them learn best.
“Adults learn best when they feel the need to learn and when
they have a sense of responsibility for what, why and how they
learn. Adults use experience as a resource in learning – so the
learning content and process must bear a perceived and
meaningful relationship to past experience. What is to be
learned should be related to the individual’s development
changes and life tasks.”
(Brookfield, 1983).
As you read, think of examples from your own and your learners’
experiences.
Unit 2
interpersonal life. We are being asked then to engage with that
dilemma, in order to enable the learner to deal with it and move on.
We have to be very sensitive, but perhaps above all to allow any of
that hidden agenda to surface when the learner clearly wants to allow
it, and to create the supporting conditions for such feelings to be
integrated into the group culture and the group’s tasks. And we have
to be prepared to be as practically helpful as we can be.
z This is essentially a mentoring role, and will be aided by the
acquisition of counselling skills.
Unit 2
While children can often be persuaded to learn simply by passing
examinations or gaining adult approval or other rewards, this does
not work with adults. This is why adults are capable of learning faster
and more effectively than children.
Houle (1984) has identified three types of general orientation in adult
learning:
1 Goal orientated – for accomplishing fairly clear objectives.
Learners do not restrict their activities to any one type of
teaching or one method of learning. The need or interest appears,
and they satisfy it by taking a course or joining a group, reading a
book or going on a trip.
2 Activity orientated – just to be engaged in an activity.
Participation and social contact are the goals, rather than
learning a particular subject.
3 Learning oriented – seeking knowledge for its own sake. May
participate in higher education to develop understanding rather
than for qualifications.
We have to convert these general orientations into specific orientation
to our own programmes. It is therefore important as a learning
facilitator to know what the learner’s individual orientation is and to
be sympathetic to it. Then you can help them to relate what they are
learning with you to their individual pattern of needs and goals. It’s
also crucial however, for the reasons suggested above, that you use
their general orientation to get them to develop an intrinsic interest in
the course content (though sometimes this is difficult) because this
will make the whole of the learning experience meaningful.
Unit 2
than in traditional class teaching, releasing the language acquisition
system from the constraints of being in the subordinate, learner role.
In fact, this method is part of an ideal culture of learning which
should be as close as possible to the culture of the practitioners in that
field – a sort of apprenticeship in the field of knowledge (Seely Brown
et al, 1989).
z Teachers needs to understand the distinct kinds of mental
processes involved at each level if they are to help learners
operate at that level. In this way, a course can become a kind of
training in thinking.
cycle can be broken. However, you may have to insert the crucial bits
of scientific knowledge if they are at all specialised. The learners can
ask questions, toss ideas about and so on. To monitor and evaluate
the processes of using organic methods, they can add scientific
observation and testing to the normal methods they use for evaluating
their own crops.
(The Open University, UK has some excellent case studies of this
kind of programme from the Mount Kenya area).
Unit 2
he says:
“... learning then, always begins with experience; there can be
no learning that does not begin with experience, although the
level of consciousness of the learner plays a significant part in
both the experience and the learning.”
What the Kenya farming support services are doing is to raise that
level of consciousness.
Knowles stresses the application of contemplation and reflective
practice – the learning processes used in problem-solving.
z Experience forms a strong foundation for learning, if the
facilitator can help learners make the link between their
experience and the new learning.
Self-directed learning
Unit 2
Learners need to develop the ability to identify gaps in their
knowledge and skills, especially those that they have identified as pre-
requisites. They also need to learn how they can fill those gaps,
perhaps by using other people’s expertise or turning to another
learning resource.
Self-assessing progress
Self-directed learning also lends itself to self-assessment of progress.
Learners need to judge whether they have really understood
something properly, and if they haven’t, the reasons why. If the
learning objectives are understood very clearly and they are
meaningful, then it is much easier for learners to self-assess whether
or not they have achieved the right level of learning.
Learners may find this difficult. At school, learners are almost always
told by their teachers whether they have got something right or not,
and that may be a difficult expectation to change. It helps to give the
sort of feedback that gradually facilitates self-assessment of progress.
Once the habit of self-direction is established, this process becomes a
lot easier.
Now test out the ideas you have learned about in this unit, by talking
to some young adult learners.
Activity 2.2
(This is a longer activity. Allow time for the discussions, plus
about 30 minutes to write up findings.)
Meet with a small group of young adults from your community
and discuss with them the sort of things they would like to
learn and why. Then describe some non-formal methods of
learning that they could use. Find out their different learning
preferences and the reasons for these preferences.
Discuss your findings with others (friends, co-workers and/or
tutorial group). Try to relate your findings to the concepts you
have learned in Units 1 and 2, about learning and how adults
learn.
Then describe your findings in your learning journal (about 30
minutes).
Unit summary
Unit 2
z The concept of self-directedness.
You have also been introduced to some strategies that facilitators can
use for adult learning programmes.
To check how you have got on, look back at the learning outcomes
for this unit and see if you can now do them. When you have done
this, look through your learning journal to remind yourself of what
you have learned and the ideas you have generated.
In the next unit we will look at the philosophical and psychological
ideas that underpin this Diploma’s approach to learning.
References
Unit 2
Knowles, M. S. (1975) Self-directed learning, Association Press, Follet
Publishing Co.
Knowles, M. S. (1978) The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species, Gulf
Publishing Co., Houston, USA
Knox, A. B. (1977) Adult Development and Learning, Jossey-Bass, San
Francisco
Rogers, C. R. (1969) Freedom to Learn, Merril, Columbus
Seely Brown, J., Collins, A. and Guguid, P. (1989) ‘Situated
Cognition and the Culture of Learning’ in Educational Researcher (Jan-
Feb)
Unit 3
A positive philosophy of learning ............................... 78
Developing the whole person ...................................... 79
Lifelong learning ........................................................ 88
Guiding principles ...................................................... 90
Unit summary ...........................................................104
Answers to self-help questions ...................................105
References.................................................................108
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit introduction
Unit 3
that explain the theoretical basis for the practical approaches in later
units. It also brings in practical activities to help you to relate the
ideas to examples and your own experiences.
When you have worked through this unit, you should be able to:
z outline the principles that underpin the ideas of education for all,
developing the whole person and lifelong learning
z apply the principles to practical examples and problems to do
with developing the whole person.
Unit 3
objectives of the Diploma, then that is fine. We do, however, ask you
to work your way through this unit carefully, to understand and
evaluate the guiding philosophical influences on the Diploma
material. Take your time over the ideas and compare them to your
own ideas and experiences.
The quotation from the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains why the
writers of this Diploma consider that an educational philosophy that
supports elite and exclusive learning is totally contrary to youth
development work. The concept of youth development was generated
in the democratic ethical framework summarised by ‘equal social
justice for all’: for us, this also means ‘equal education for all’. Youth
development workers are involved in both formal and informal
training and education, and we work with young people who are
generally marginalised by the effects of current global economics. We
see education for all as the keystone to successful youth development
work. In this unit we start by exploring education for all from two
perspectives:
z developing the whole person, or total development
z lifelong learning, or developing people throughout their lives.
Total development
The concept of ‘total development’ in all three domains has
implications for the learning process.
Over the last decade, the idea of ‘emotional intelligence’ has become
a major theme in education. For example, in the education of
children it is understood that unless teachers can teach children to
manage the emotional aspects of their learning behaviour and mental
attitude, their emotions can impede their cognitive learning. It has
become much more obvious in turbulent schools in rich countries that
teachers have to manage their classes’ emotional education if they are
to teach anything successfully. But taught properly, these abilities can
enable learners to use their emotional energies as a powerful tool to
shape their social and cognitive learning.
This would also be true of their psychomotor abilities, which are so
important in physical activity of any kind, from playing for the school
basketball team to becoming a brain surgeon. For example, the
pioneering work of Rudolf Laban, the great dance teacher, began
with a study of how to improve the quality of the work experience of
manual workers. Fine-tuning their physical movement fed into the
quality of their emotional and social lives, as well as enhanced job
performance.
The theory is that the fine-tuning of each of the three domains within
a powerfully integrated framework means that all domains are
enhanced and the whole person develops more rapidly – holistic
Unit 3
determined to thwart the teacher will not perform intellectually
as the teacher intends.”
“Educators are also becoming aware of the other side of the
coin – that is that the learner’s powers are vastly enhanced when
not only his intellect is stimulated but also when his feelings are
respected, his body is nurtured, and his will to learn is
strengthened. Effective education, therefore, is found when the
learner is regarded as a person to be respected, nurtured,
strengthened and stimulated, rather than just as an intellect to
be trained.”
Philosophies of the Branches of Knowledge, Encyclopaedia Britannica (1996)
As we saw in Unit 1, the cognitive theorist Jean Piaget says that the
process of laying down neurologically the basic patterns (schemata)
for an activity is done through assimilating new examples to the
existing schemata. In the process, the schemata are made to
accommodate the new examples. Although this is true in principle for
all three domains, cognitive abilities are approached somewhat
differently from affective and psychomotor abilities. It is important
that the facilitator understands how to create the best conditions for
learning in each domain, as well as holistically. That involves
analysing what the nature of the form of knowledge is, and what part
of that knowledge is being dealt with at a given time.
Unit 3
What kind of knowledge? What kind of learning?
To tackle the question: ‘What kind of knowledge?’ we need first to
explore the concepts of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’. Underpinning
the work of teachers like Mrs Pyrah was an intuition that children
had enormous inbuilt potential for mental development, an
intellectual power that would grow irresistibly if it were given the
right circumstances in which to grow. She realised that it couldn’t be
taught as such, because of the sheer volume of knowledge and mental
strategies involved, which no teaching system had time to implant.
What she felt was that it would unfold from the general mental
structures that everyone is born with. The roots of that lie in a
particularly modern version of classical rationalism.
Rationalism
Rationalism consists of various philosophies that emphasise that the
part played by people’s ability to reason when acquiring and
evaluating knowledge is more significant than the part played by
experience, and that we are born with this abstract power to reason.
The twentieth-century version of this philosophy was the theory that
we are born with pre-structured general categories of thought in our
minds. These determine the structure and remarkable speed of our
linguistic development and the rapid development of structures of
thought. All we need to develop thought and language and number
systems is the kind of experience and conditions that trigger the
underlying, rational, inborn, creative processes. (You have already
met this idea in Unit 1, in the account of Chomsky’s and Jackendoff ’s
theories. It is also there in the work of the cognitive theorists, though
slightly more subdued.)
z If this is true and if we can build our learning facilitation around
this then we can accelerate young people’s learning significantly.
Empiricism
Empiricism is a very ancient philosophical argument but still central
to educational thought. It says that knowledge is always at base
founded on sense experience. Therefore our concepts depend upon
the experience our senses provide for us. Of course, in education we
often have to rely upon the sense-based observations of others who
are researchers and thinkers. Our sense knowledge of these ideas is
second hand but it is still knowledge gained from sense experience.
For educational facilitators, what follows from this idea is that they
must try to understand how sense experience can best be formed into
mental patterns, and how patterns of reasoning can be built up from
sense experience. The emphasis is always on increasing the quality of
learners’ experience of the world and reflecting back skilfully on that
experience in order to build up thought.
A powerful strand of the educational ideas in this module is based on
this view. The psychologists who are entirely empiricist are, of course,
the behaviourists. In practice, most educators use a combination of
rationalist and empiricist theorising, some with more emphasis on
rationalism, some with more emphasis on empiricism. A facilitator
such as Mrs Pyrah placed enormous emphasis on empirical scientific
and social research despite her strong rationalist approach, which
expressed itself in the talk-based curriculum: for example, her pupils
did an enormous amount of practical scientific investigation.
The self-help questions and activities that follow are designed to help
you think about conditions for learning in the three domains –
cognitive, affective and psychomotor – and to apply the theory to
practical examples.
Unit 3
best can the youth leader get her to master these quickly?
Discuss this with others (co-workers and/or tutorial group) and
then make some notes in your learning journal.
Before reading on, compare your answers with those
suggested at the end of the unit.
Activity 3.1
(about 10 minutes)
Discuss with others what you think some of the elements of
emotional intelligence might be, and then write down your
thoughts in your own words, in your learning journal.
Activity 3.2
(about 20 minutes)
Observe the process of skill learning in any situation familiar to
you. For example:
z learning to drive a vehicle
z learning to write a letter
z learning to operate a sewing machine
z learning to make a cake
z learning to repair electronic equipment
z any other skill relevant to you.
Record your observations in your learning journal. Consider
what the different forms of knowledge involved consist of.
Unit 3
Symbolic processes
Symbolic emphasis
“... it is to be noted that human learning is largely dominated by
symbolic processes. Much of the learning that human beings
acquire during their lifetimes is gained through their growing
ability to understand and manipulate symbols – verbal,
mathematical, artistic, musical and so on.”
“This symbolic emphasis gives human learning much of its
power... The symbolic emphasis also brings dangers. It can trap
people into circling around at a high level of generality without
ever feeling the need to tie abstractions to concrete
applications.”
Philosophies of the Branches of Knowledge, Encyclopaedia Britannica (1996)
find this a problem, because they were subjected to formal talk daily
on television and they were reading so many books that complex
written registers became very familiar to them. As contemporary
rationalists (such as Chomsky) argue, children have an in-built
language acquisition system that rapidly enables them to formulate
the grammar of high registers until they become their own.
For example, if you live in a country that is multi-lingual, you will
have experience of how children learn two or more languages at the
same time without any problem, despite enormous differences in
grammar. If you have trained to become an expert engineer or nurse,
you will also notice how quickly and easily you acquired the formal
language of that role. This is what the contemporary rationalists are
commenting on.
However, this high-level language has the symbolic weight of
authority and expertise – public confidence. Choosing to talk in that
way, under the guidance of the teacher, had the symbolic effect of the
children’s taking on of formal roles, the sorts of roles that teachers,
managers, experts have. That role-taking in turn made accessing the
knowledge of specialists much easier.
Take another example, which looks at utilising the techniques of the
‘inner game’. If you pretend to be your favourite cricket player when
you go out on the field, doing this will very rapidly improve your
grasp of basic skills. The skills you are emulating are those of your
favourite players and they symbolise the glamour and power of great
cricketers. This symbolic role-taking is powerfully energising to your
usual skill-acquisition process.
In the example of the young street mathematicians from Sao Paolo
(Unit 1, Case study 1.3), the balance was too much on the concrete
world and needed a little more of the symbolic to allow them to move
forward. The balance was empirical and needed rational reflection to
facilitate progress.
In this section we have looked at what is meant by ‘developing the
whole person’ particularly in terms of the three domains – cognitive,
affective and psychomotor. We have looked at rationalist and
empiricist philosophies about ways of acquiring knowledge and the
influence of these in learning and teaching.
Lifelong learning
‘Education for all’ means that as well as developing the whole person,
learning should be possible throughout life.
Lifelong learning is vital to our economic and social development,
particularly in poverty reduction as people lose their livelihoods and
jobs in the global economic revolution. The lifelong learning principle
is based on the psychological research that shows that it’s never too
late for learning.
As currently understood, lifelong learning is a concept that covers all
forms of learning, both within and outside the formal education
system. Adult or continuing education are just two illustrations of the
use of lifelong learning opportunities. The lifelong learning principle
also shifts the attention from the learning ‘system’ or ‘institution’ to
the nature of the learner; it encourages learners to take more
responsibility for their learning.
z Economic necessity and more: it has become an increasing
economic necessity for many people to upgrade their skills
continually wherever technological and social development
occurs: some skills learned through school education can become
outdated even by the time the learner enters the world of work.
However, the philosophy of lifelong learning is meant to serve a
Unit 3
purpose much broader than social and psychological necessity.
z Self-realisation: even formal education is now considered a
preparation for lifelong learning, through ‘self-realisation’. It has
to develop skills, attitudes and interests, and a whole set of
personality characteristics that will enable learners to continue to
extend their capacity for controlling their own development
throughout their lives.
z Democracy: despite the current wide-ranging critique of the
political use of the concept of democracy in the new world order,
democratic philosophy seems to be the only political philosophy
that entails access to education as a fundamental individual right.
When democratic philosophy’s main entailments – individual
autonomy, individual responsibility and the need to abolish
privilege – are considered, it becomes clear that lifelong learning
must be essential to realising the democratic ideal.
z Skills for growth: For young men and women to ‘self actualise’
(which is the top of the Maslow hierarchy and is the first of
Rousseau’s principles of education – see box below) they will
need help (the third of Rousseau’s principles of education). They
will need help in acquiring the ability to select, plan, execute and
evaluate learning activities to satisfy their own individual needs
but also the needs of the community. Consideration of
community needs is essential, as there is no self-actualisation
independent of the communities to which we belong: we are a
social species.
Guiding principles
So what are the principles that underpin the idea of ‘education for all’
as applied to adult learning? This section looks at six aspects of adult
learning (some of which you have met already) and examines some
of the philosophical and psychological principles on which they are
founded.
1 Maturation and readiness.
2 Learner needs and motivation.
3 Participation.
4 Teaching as guidance.
5 Discovery and experiential learning.
6 A positive learning environment.
Unit 3
equality and fraternity. This is, of course, one of the highly
proclaimed ideals of democracy. It is, however, an ideal that is in
frequent conflict with the main thrust of capitalism, which is also
argued to be essential to democracy.
The basis of Rousseau’s philosophy is that all people as children are
born with an original, perfect nature. The aim of education, in order
to build the ideal society, is to preserve this essential nature by
adapting education to the natural stages of growth of this perfect
nature. He sees education as occurring on the basis of three
principles:
1 The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of
nature.
2 What we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the
education of things.
3 The use we learn to make of our growth is the education of men.
Unit 3
of cognitive structure is approached with
complete. conflicting
attitudes.
Activity 3.3
(about 20 minutes)
Think back to your school days. Discuss the following questions
with others and write a response in your learning journal.
z Did all the children in your class get readily involved in the
learning activities?
z How many of them spent adequate energy and time on
learning?
z Why do you think some students spend more time and
energy in doing the set work in the learning situation?
z What were your own goals in doing the set work?
Unit 3
z What differences have you observed in groups of adult
learners? Give some examples of how these differences
illustrate ideas discussed in this unit.
3 Participation
Democratic systems mean that anyone approaching adult life should
have the ability and right to participate as partners in anything that
affects them, especially their own learning – which includes more
than mere preparation for a job. Their learning needs and capacity for
responsible behaviour are not the same as those of children, and
therefore they should learn by methods matched with their needs and
capacities. In other words, they need participation, not just
preparation.
Unit 3
recombined in different ways to produce different meanings.
By doing this to the concrete representations of the generative
themes, he showed how reality and language in combination could be
used to demonstrate how the real world could be changed. In the case
of the price of coffee beans, for example, he could show from
analysing the concept of price and its associated terms – market,
trade, competition, value – how a local market monopoly could
accentuate and exploit competitive tendencies among farmers, and
they could see, from the detailed nature of the representation, what
elements of the situation might be altered and brought under their
own collective control, while also realising the importance of keeping
that monopolising company in the field, if possible. At the same time,
they were using this to learn to read and write.
4 Teaching as guidance
The concept of education as instruction creates a picture of the
learner as passive, merely absorbing what is prescribed by those in
control. This may be appropriate in some cases: for example, for
teaching soldiers basic skills such as how to fire a gun. However,
nowhere in the contemporary philosophy and psychology of
education is learning conceived as merely accepting the ideas of
others. Learners are expected, by the help of supportive learning
environments, to forge for themselves, through their own activity, the
knowledge and skills necessary to deal with being in the world. That
requires critical engagement with the ideas of others. This principle is
a central feature of the philosophies of Rousseau and Freire and of
rationalist theories of learning. Even formal teaching has become
considered more as guidance than instruction.
Unit 3
Thus, as a learning technique, experience and discovery are very
appropriate to the aims and objectives of adult education. Learning
through experience means there is no need to use instructional
methods that are culturally unfamiliar, irrelevant or contradictory.
However, in some cultures, discovery methods as a mode of learning
may be alien, and may well need careful introduction.
Project-based learning
Vygotsky’s research showed the importance of the social context of
learning. When learners work together, exploring and discussing
ideas, suggesting tentative solutions to problems, trying these out and
evaluating results, then there seems to be a significant and rapid
improvement in linguistic and learning skills. For example, Richard
Owen (Lorac and Weiss, 1981) investigated groups of secondary
school children engaged in film-making and constructing tape/slide
projects. The process involved children translating cognitive and
affective ideas into visual and oral form. This confirmed Vygotsky’s
views, but also showed that the process of finding visual and sound
equivalences of the children’s ideas promoted the use of technically
sophisticated language, which in turn aided the deep understanding
of concepts.
Such experiential group learning meets the learners’ social needs as
well as motivational needs. It generates and sustains intrinsic
motivation towards the problems to be solved, because, while these
problems stretch the learners’ abilities, the technology used facilitates
solving the problems. There is positive involvement, sufficient quality
conversation, the use of reasoning, shared problem-solving and group
discovery. These abilities therefore become integrated into the
mainstream learning culture and do not remain the domain of
technical experts and inaccessible. Learning by experience and
discovery also increases the overall intellectual potency of learners as
they acquire the principles of how to learn and solve problems.
Overcoming barriers
This approach also helps to remove barriers to learning. To
understand this problem of barriers, you need to think of the learning
Unit 3
their fears go. Thomas’ relationship with his students was one of felt
personal equality. This may be difficult, for example in Islamic
cultures where the status of the teacher is very high indeed and
respect for the teacher is paramount. What we have done with Islamic
students is to establish a feeling of strong and clear mutual respect
between facilitator and students, which abides by the cultural norms.
But it stresses the role of the facilitator as increasingly ‘learning’ from
the students, as well as being initially the ‘leader’ and ‘teacher’ of the
students.
One of the great barriers to learning has been the level of social
control exercised by dominant intellectual elites over the main
population of learners. This has been through processes like
‘intelligence testing’, and using the normal assessment and grading
techniques to ‘stream’ and ‘band’ learners. Often, use of these
procedures has not been genuinely to test people’s potential but to
allocate scarce resources in ways that society has agreed upon. The
very best IQ tests undoubtedly can pick out key features of learner’s
underlying mental skills. This can be useful if it is recognised that
these tests also miss out significant areas of human ability, for
example in social intelligence and visual creativity. But they are rarely
used like that in streaming and banding procedures. Many of your
learners may have been subjected to these processes, and they may
have resulted in dangerous labelling effects. You need to do your best
to treat these ideas critically if you are to break down the barriers to
learning.
Social conditions
Knowles (1980) suggests four basic social ingredients to produce an
environment that is conducive to learning:
z respect for personality
z freedom of expression and availability of information
z participation in decision-making
Psychological conditions
Psychological factors that need to be considered in creating a positive
learning environment are:
z the past experiences that learners have had with success and
failure
z their beliefs about what was responsible for such success or
failure
z whether they believe that such factors are under their control or
beyond their control.
If their experiences have been positive, learners will be intrinsically
motivated to face future learning situations readily and confidently.
They should already know how to achieve certain goals, and how to
initiate and regulate learning activities to produce desired results.
There are a few other factors that you need to consider regarding the
learning environment:
z the learners’ perceptions of and attitudes towards the facilitator
z the extent to which the educational programmes receive
recognition and support from employers
z the interest expressed in such programmes at local and national
level.
In Unit 5 there is a further discussion on how facilitators can prepare
learning environments that encourage learning.
Now that we have looked at what developing the whole person and
lifelong learning and their underlying principles mean for adult
learning, the final activity in this unit asks you to bring together your
ideas and present them in your own words. This is a very effective
way of checking that you have mastered and absorbed new concepts.
Activity 3.4
(about 30 minutes)
Imagine that a colleague (another youth development worker,
but one who is not studying on this diploma) says to you:
‘What’s all this about developing the whole person and
lifelong learning? How can all these theories help us in our
real life work?’
What would you reply? Look back through the ideas outlined in
this unit and write notes in your learning journal about the
main points you would make in response.
Unit 3
Unit summary
Unit 3
the overall map of the economic issues. This is a high level of mental
organisation, because she will have to synthesise lots of information
into a whole pattern in such a way that any part of it can be retrieved.
These two things she must be able to do very quickly on the spot and
to repeat them in varied forms with many different people.
Affective domain: This requires considerable social intelligence and
knowledge. She will need a very clear map in her head of the local
political balance of power, including the different levels of power, so
that she knows what she can say, to whom, and in what way. She
needs to know what actions will be politically feasible when in office,
and she needs to know how to get this across to people in a way that
will convince them that she knows what she is doing and can make
things happen.
Psychomotor domain: Not only does she need the social skills to
handle large public meetings in different locations, and small face-to-
face interaction with people of different levels of knowledge and
different status, she needs to integrate this with movements and
gestures that are crucial in social interaction.
In addition, you have to help her writing her manifesto. Because this
is a learning situation, she will have to do the bulk of the work by
herself, but you could help by first doing a more detailed analysis of
what we have covered above, so that you know the essential
framework for the learning.
As a motivated adult, she will already have a lot of social knowledge
and intelligence, and probably some basic understanding of the
economic and social issues. The first stage is to get her talking to
people with relevant expertise (who will help her get inside and
master the zone of proximal development) and/or direct her to
readable but knowledgeable texts on the economic situation. She can
then be helped to develop a structured flow diagram (a ‘mind map’)
of all the economic issues. By exploratory talking with her, you can
help each other to create a supportive scaffold for the new ideas.
Unit 3
letting that be the stimulus for the reinforcement of an effortless
‘follow through’ in which the momentum of the tool carries the
movement forward. This then becomes the stimulus for the upward
swing of the pick or the sledgehammer, all the time letting the
vibrations in the handle of the tool tell you about the quality of the
action.
But this work needs more than that: it needs ‘knowledge’ of the
materials being worked: the sedimentary rock that has to be broken in
the most energy-effective and sensitive way; the mechanics of the soil,
so that you don’t break up its substructure any more than absolutely
necessary; and the best way to arrange the broken rock in the netting
wire so that it will absorb the frightening energy of water that is run
off on steep slopes during storms such as those in the monsoon.
This is scientific knowledge, held at first in cognitive mode, but then
integrated into the intuitive psychomotor knowledge of the body and
affectively controlled by the pleasure of doing qualitatively good
work. The point is that, though we tend to split mind/body/feelings
conceptually, and for analytic purposes Bloom does the same, this is
really only for convenience and manageability.
Deep-structure psychomotor ability gains immeasurably from this
sense of holistic meaningfulness. The skills of the subsistence farmer
and the housewife have this kind of depth to them. If this is so, then,
as we said earlier in this section, by exploring people’s experiential
knowledge and exposing its nature, we can use that to move on to
almost anything else that we choose, providing we can create the
appropriate steps, understand the types and levels of difficulty
involved and find different ways around the various learning
obstacles. In this way, we can move freely back and forth among the
cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.
Once the psychomotor skill is in place, the deep-structure capacity for
it never really disappears. However, it can only be refined and
maintained properly through regular practice.
References
Unit 3
Unit 4: Informal
education
Unit 4
Unit summary ...........................................................131
Answers to self-help questions ...................................132
References.................................................................134
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit introduction
Unit 4
When you have worked through this unit, you should be able to:
z distinguish between formal, informal and non-formal education
z identify agents of learning and the ways they provide informal
learning
z analyse examples of informal education
z suggest ways of providing informal education opportunities for
young people.
Activity 4.1
(about 20 minutes)
Complete the table below by answering the questions for each
agent. Note how the agents of education differ from each
other according to the criteria.
Make notes in your learning journal about your findings. Did
the activity help you understand the differences between the
agents. Were there any surprises?
The family
Unit 4
Village
elders/
folklore/ folk
drama
Religious
organisations
Educational
institutions
Peer group
Cultural
institutions
Community
organisations
(including
clubs, health
centres,
youth
centres)
The mass
media
The
workplace
Unit 4
Learning processes
Here are some of the learning processes that operate in different
settings:
z imitation z modelling z identification
z observation z memorisation z communication
z dialogue z presumption z non-consideration
z rejection z problem-solving z contemplation
z reflection z experimentation
How effective these processes are will vary with the age of the
learners and the characteristics of the setting.
Jarvis (1987) categorised contemplation, experimentation and
reflection (reflective practice) as higher-order learning processes than
processes such as imitation or memorisation. Yet he also cautions
against evaluating the effectiveness of a learning process in isolation
of its setting. Even a formal lecture provided in an egalitarian setting
might result in contemplation or experimental learning. An
egalitarian environment promotes learning not only for the learner
but also for the facilitator, who will focus on other elements that
influence learning.
First, here is a task that asks you to reflect on your own experiences
of informal learning.
The family
Religious organisations
Educational institutions
Peer group
Cultural institutions
Community organisations
The workplace
The family
Most individuals learn their social roles (the roles of being a son,
daughter, brother, sister) and acceptable social behaviour in the family
Unit 4
setting. This kind of informal learning enables children to change
their behaviour from being at first self-centred, to becoming more
being socially aware, and eventually to caring for the needs and rights
of other family members.
At its simplest level, the family uses a system of rewards and
punishments, and from that the behaviour of the child is shaped until
it is socially acceptable. It is at this level that parents or parent
substitutes can use behaviourist tactics (e.g. ignoring bad behaviour
where possible, and rewarding good behaviour). However, the child
learns much more than this from ‘observation’, ‘imitation’,
‘memorising’, ‘modelling’ and ‘participating’. Through these learning
processes, plus the key one of taking on the roles of other family
members, or through empathy with their situations, the child learns to
understand the deeper levels of accepted norms in social groups,
especially adult-child relationships, gender roles, and social skills and
cultural values.
There have been significant changes in these processes as the
extended family has been eroded through industrialisation,
urbanisation, migration of labour and poverty. More recently, this
process has broken down much further with even the nuclear family
being threatened due to changes such as ease of divorce, the growth
of single-parent families and the threats from accelerating global
economic processes.
The good news is that the loosening of traditional gender role-taking
means that gender stereotypes can be broken down. This must be seen
as a precondition for involving men and boys in achieving gender
equality. This is very important, particularly when we consider that
the process of socialisation begins in the family. Thus, the new social
attitudes and norms that are transferred to both boys and girls will
influence their perceptions of their own roles, as well as the roles of
others.
The contemporary home needs to become a more consciously
educative environment. This is partly because of the need to support
the learning of the young people who are faced with the challenges of
making their way in a demanding adult world, and partly because the
parents are facing more complex financial and occupational
challenges which mean they need to keep upgrading their own
knowledge. The home can also provide an important setting for the
education of both boys and girls on issues of sexual and reproductive
health, as well as alcohol and drug abuse. There is an urgent need for
the family to increase the awareness of boys and girls of the
consequences of uninformed sexual behaviour and the spread of
HIV/AIDS.
Activity 4.2
(about 20 minutes)
Can you recall an oral tradition in your family history that has
affected your learning? How has this oral tradition affected
you?
How might you as an elder express in story form to your
children and grandchildren what you feel should be admired
and feared today?
Write your responses and an outline of your story in your
Unit 4
journal and discuss them with your family and colleagues.
Religious organisations
Religious organisations, such as churches, temples, mosques or
synagogues, may be agents of all three types of learning:
z informal learning through personal interactions with individuals
and groups of different social classes
z non-formal activities such as Sunday schools, Daham Pasals,
sermons and religious festivities
z formal learning opportunities offered by religion-based schools.
Religious organisations can also be agents of informal learning
through social events and community service projects. Participation
in such activities helps young people to broaden their vision and
develop their social and inter-personal, decision-making and problem-
solving skills.
Educational institutions
Although educational institutions, such as schools, universities and
technical colleges, are generally thought of as agents of formal
learning, there are many opportunities for informal learning too,
especially through interaction with peers.
Children learn a great deal informally through their interactions with
teachers and through participation in extra-curricular activities.
Unit 4
It is mostly during adolescence that the peer group becomes
significant in someone’s life. During this phase, when young people
start interacting with male and female peers, they face new situations,
and new responsibilities are thrust upon them. As we have mentioned
already, the peer group provides plenty of informal learning
opportunities.
Through mixing with equals, young people get essential preparation
for adult life. They learn necessary social skills, appropriate gender
roles and acquire the skills needed for courtship and a stable
marriage. They also learn to achieve and accept status in a group on
their own account, rather than because of what they have inherited
from their family.
Cultural institutions
Cultural institutions, for example museums and arts centres and
libraries, provide new experiences that help people to discover their
latent talents, new interests and avenues for meaningful leisure time
activities.
The following case study is about a young English man. It illustrates
the non-formal and informal learning opportunities provided by
cultural institutions.
Activity 4.3
(about 20 minutes)
Discuss the case study and the following questions with others
(friends, co-workers, tutorial group) and then make notes in
your learning journal.
1 What role did Scully’s middle-class girlfriend play in his
overall education? What were the long-term positive
benefits that Scully received through participating in the
centre activities?
2 Which of those benefits could have resulted from informal
education?
3 Can you describe any similar cases from your own or
others’ experiences?
Community organisations
Community organisations tend to pursue programmes with specific
objectives aimed at target groups in the community (for example,
boys’ and girls’ clubs, health centres, youth centres, gramodaya
mandalaya, mahila samakhya, lions’ clubs, jaycees, rotary groups and
soroptomists).
Through participation in programme activities, members of a
particular target group can learn a great deal informally. It is in this
setting that youth development workers can best facilitate learning
Unit 4
intellectual decision made about it, but mentally storing the decision
until a parallel situation stimulates its recall. The process of
contemplation should take place continually and become part of our
mental habits.
Reflective practice is the process of solving practical problems or
performing practical tasks in the real world, and analysing and
theorising on the basis of what happens. In other words, learners
construct their own theories from the practical activities that they do
rather than from reading them in books. This is a method widely used
in teacher-training in the UK, because trainee teachers at first find it
difficult to connect educational theory with the very vital and
challenging business of working with children.
The great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire introduced problem-posing
and dialogue in his conscientisation model, as a method that leads to
empowerment. He was very successful in raising the literacy and
political skills of poor Brazilian farmers by this approach. (For more
on Freire’s work, see Unit 3 and Reading 9.)
All of these learning processes are activated through participation in
projects and experiential learning methods.
The workplace
The workplace offers many opportunities for education and learning.
Many workplaces offer on-the-job training. Workers constantly learn
informally from each other by sharing tasks, observing each other,
asking questions. Trade unions in the metropolitan countries also
provide training and informal learning opportunities in negotiation
and problem-solving. Many workplaces have formal, professional
development programmes. They may offer development workshops,
for example on health and safety issues, as well as seminars and
conferences.
Marsick and Watkins (1990) examine four different levels at which
informal learning can take place in the workplace:
z individual
z group
z organisational
z professional.
The pace of change means that there are enormous requirements for
learning in the contemporary workplace, which will require
increasingly informal learning processes throughout the entire
organisation of work. Individuals grow by being open to others.
Through feedback, they learn how others see them. Through self-
disclosure, they open themselves to the potential for more intimate
relationships. The vision is one of holistic informal learning for the
contemporary workplace.
The quality of learning in groups is very different from other
situations, because of the inevitable processes of interaction. The
process of learning here is one of multi-tasking. Groups learn about
group processes and their roles in these, because they monitor the
effectiveness of the group interaction. They simultaneously learn
about the effectiveness of work processes through attending to getting
tasks done. One of the barriers to learning in groups is the pressure to
conform to group norms, because individuals form strong common
values and bonds, which may not encourage them to subject
controversial ideas to a thorough hearing.
Within the general ideal of the learning society, there has developed
the concept of the learning organisation. When organisations are
structured so as to learn, individuals become agents who influence
the way others in the organisation think and act. It’s a bit like the
football team that plays total football. Along each line of production,
each worker on the line knows what the person before them, and the
one after them, is doing and requires of them. They also know what
the company is producing, the problems it faces and their place in the
whole production and distribution process. A learning organisation is
open to learning from internal and external feedback from its
environment. At the professional level also, feedback and disclosure
are central to the learning organisation.
Unit 4
Information
Entertainment is only one of the functions of the mass media. They
also provide an enormous amount of information. They are used for
informing audiences about:
z products and services (commercial advertising)
z topical issues – news, current affairs programmes, documentaries
z campaigns, interviews, panel discussions and public debate etc.
z culture (programmes on sports, music, drama and the arts)
z scientific and technical matters for rural workers and businesses.
Education
Many educational institutions, for example the Indira Ghandi Open
University, offer formal learning at a distance, using various media
such as TV, radio and the internet. There are many opportunities for
non-formal and self-directed learning also, as people follow their
interests independently through the media.
In all of their functions, the mass media act as agents of informal
education. When we watch a film, a TV serial or a teledrama, we
probably tend to identify with the characters who would normally be
accepted in society. We may also gain insight into the lives and ideas
of people who are different from us, and who may not easily fit into
our societies.
For example, television in Pakistan is notable for its dramas, which
use dramatic story-telling to explore problems of relationships
between town and country and the conflict of values and lifestyles
between old and young, rich and poor. These are an important source
of national dialogue, particularly as they use traditional dramatic
forms and expose the arguments thoroughly.
The media can provide people with a unique opportunity to observe
people and situations they would not otherwise meet. Through this
identification, they may experience either new learning or non-
learning.
Persuasion
Mass media may also convey subtle messages that lead to social or
anti-social behaviour, depending on the manner in which the
messages are perceived and received. The sponsorship of amusing
and enjoyable sports programmes by tobacco companies is a good
example. However, as Katz (1989) points out, the effectiveness of
mass media as agencies of persuasion depends on the ability of
audiences to evaluate what is happening, in their selective exposure,
perception and retention of messages. These media experiences can
be used by youth workers to explore and develop themes with their
groups.
The potency of mass media as an agent of informal education is
strongest in the case of children, who imitate the characters who
appeal to them. Often, children are seen imitating mannerisms,
gestures and language used by popular film and television characters.
In the case of adolescents, imitation involves adopting new fashions,
products, ideas, interests and behaviours. The media create
motivation for action by altering people’s values, preferences or
perceptions of themselves.
Agenda setting
The agenda-setting function of mass media has an effect even in the
case of adults. Here, it is argued that media tell us what to think
about. The media can set the agenda – political, social or otherwise.
Priorities for society are often set by the media, and the public is
socialised to accept these priorities as important.
More than any other agent of education, the media have succeeded in
creating a global culture, which transcends national boundaries, and
creates a new awareness, new aspirations and visions for their
audiences.
To get you thinking about the part the mass media can play in
informal learning, read the following short case study and then do the
activity that follows.
Activity 4.4
(about 20 minutes)
Discuss the following questions with others (friends, co-
workers and/or tutorial group) and then make notes in your
learning journal. If you prefer, you could discuss an equivalent
Unit 4
TV drama from your country instead.
1 What do you consider to be the goal of this drama?
2 What might be its effect on a person who has never
intimately known a person from another ethnic group?
3 Why would this case study fit what we call ‘agenda
setting’?
Activity 4.5
(about 30–40 minutes)
Make a list of the situations of informal learning for youth with
which you are involved (check against the list of agents given
in the section on Types of learning and education).
Then take the list of learning processes given earlier in this
unit:
z imitation z modelling z identification
z observation z memorisation z communication
z dialogue z presumption z non-consideration
z rejection z problem-solving z contemplation
z reflection z experimentation.
Make notes about which learning processes take place in the
situations you have identified, and the ways in which they
happen.
Finally, suggest ways that other processes on the list could be
used to improve the informal learning of the young people
involved in the situations you have listed. (For example: could
you develop specific problem-solving activities in a youth
centre?)
Unit summary
Unit 4
In the next unit we look at the factors that help and factors that
hinder learning.
Unit 4
References
Unit 5
References.................................................................149
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit introduction
Unit 5
When you have worked through this unit, you should be able to:
z identify the factors that help or hinder people’s learning,
particularly in informal settings
z suggest ways to create a good learning environment, including
physical, social and psychological conditions.
Activity 5.1
(about [?] minutes)
Before you continue, go back to Unit 3 ‘Education for all’ to
the section headed ‘Guiding principles’ and reread ‘6 A
positive learning environment’.
Think of any classroom or outdoor activity that you really liked
during your childhood or adolescence. What characteristics in
that social and physical environment made it easy for you to
learn?
Ask a group of young people you work with to do this exercise,
too. Compare your answers with theirs in a group situation and
encourage general discussion.
Then make notes in your learning journal about both sets of
experiences.
Activity 5.2
Unit 5
(about 10 minutes)
Discuss Case study 5.1 with others (co-workers and/or tutorial
groups).
Then in your learning journal, list the conditions, physical and
social, that you think are conducive to learning.
Is there anything in this case study that you think may hinder
learning? If you think there is something, how could it be
resolved?
He illustrates it as follows:
Physical surroundings
Organisational structure
Unit 5
Factors that hinder learning
Activity 5.2
(about 20 minutes)
List all the ways you can think of that a learner could be
disturbed in his studies by characteristics of the physical
environment (for example, sounds, sights, other people, space
restrictions, disorganisation). Also think about any social
conditions that can hinder learning (for example, poor
relationships with tutors or peers).
Then survey the place where you are studying and identify any
such distracting features.
Discuss with others how the situation could be corrected and
make notes in your learning journal.
Learner-related factors
Some of the learner-related factors that can hinder learning are:
z beliefs and attitudes
z emotional factors such as anxiety and fear
z motivation and needs of the learner
z learning styles.
The impact of learner motivation and needs, and learning styles, are
discussed further in Units 6 and 7. Here, we focus on emotional
factors, beliefs and attitudes.
Unit 5
Everyone in the class was a colleague of mine and I did not like
them to see how afraid I was.”
From Rogers J. (1997), Adults Learning
This learner was not confident about his abilities and was nervous
about performing in the presence of peers, and experienced anxiety.
This is a common characteristic among adult learners.
Facilitator-related factors
Even though adults may be happy sometimes to engage in a formal
process of learning, generally they need to experience learning as part
of their everyday lives. They like to feel that what they are learning is
going to be meaningful and relevant. Therefore, learning by
performing, rather than preparing to perform, is more appropriate for
adults. This is a key function of experiential learning.
Rogers (1986) states that a teacher or facilitator should be aware of
the normal learning processes of adults (which we have looked at in
earlier units), as well as their unique characteristics. This will allow
learners to:
z build up and enhance their existing learning techniques to make
them more efficient
z make the learning more permanent and more available for later
use
z progress to further purposeful learning.
Teaching style
Genuine, friendly interaction between the facilitator and learners, and
also among the learners themselves, helps to improve the self-
confidence and motivation of adult learners, increasing the
opportunities for success.
The type of interaction that facilitators have with learners will depend
on their personality, experience and training, and also their awareness
of the individual differences of the learners – that is their needs,
motivation, abilities and disabilities. On the other hand, learning will
be hindered if the facilitator is:
z inexperienced
z anxious or fearful of their role
z under pressure from outside or within the organisation
Unit 5
much of the new information was presented as lectures or in written
handouts. Coping with lectures, the main mode of instruction about
theory, was difficult. The students were very keen on a problem-
centred orientation to learning, and were looking forward to
opportunities for immediate application of their new knowledge to
practical situations.
The course developers had paid very little attention to these aspects.
The ultimate outcome was poor performance at the final examination
by the majority of students in the group.
Activity 5.4
(about 20 minutes)
Discuss Case study 5.3 with others (co-workers and/or tutorial
group) and then make notes in your learning journal in
response to the following issues.
1 List the facilitator factors that you think are related to the
poor performance of these learners at their final
examination.
2 Make suggestions to change these factors, so as to make a
positive impact on groups of similar adult learners.
3 What methods might be more suitable for this group to
facilitate the immediate application of theory to practical
situations?
The last activity in this unit aims to bring together your learning from
the unit and apply it.
Activity 5.5
(about 25 minutes)
Look back at the activities you have done in this unit to
identify the characteristics of a positive learning environment.
As a learning facilitator, what could you do to create such
characteristics in a learning environment with which you are
familiar?
Discuss your ideas with others (co-workers and/or tutorial
group) and then make notes in your learning journal about
what you would do.
Unit summary
Unit 5
References
Unit 5
Unit 6: Learning
styles
Unit 6
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit introduction
Unit 6
When you have worked through this unit, you should be able to:
z identify the characteristics of your own learning style and your
own spectrum of factors of intelligence
z use learning models to analyse learning styles
z outline learning strategies for a variety of individuals and groups.
Start thinking about different learning styles with the following case
study.
Unit 6
follow his lessons so well.
Jane: I don’t mind so much about their approach. I just listen to find
out what they want me to do. I wait for the cues. I only study what I
think will see me through this course. I’m more interested in the
qualification. What do you think, Semi?
Semi: I’m just really keen to find out more. I’m always reading and
asking questions. It’s hard for me not to keep asking lots of questions
in class. And I want to apply everything to real situations. I want to
try everything out there and then. Learning is really fun.
Cerebral dominance
With the development of brain scanners in the 1990s and
sophisticated medical imaging systems, a great deal of research has
been conducted into the various mental functions that are controlled
by or located in different parts of the brain. Recent discoveries are still
to be built into a sophisticated model, but much valuable knowledge
about mental processes is emerging.
Of course, significant knowledge about the brain’s structure has been
around over a long period, for example from the field of linguistics.
Most important, there is the division of the brain into two separate
hemispheres – right and left, which are connected at the centre. They
have very different functions and in most people either one side or the
other tends to be dominant. This is referred to as ‘cerebral
dominance’ – where one side of the brain tends to take control of
most of the information processing. The table below highlights some
differences between the two types.
Unit 6
As the learning style is determined to some extent by established
neurological processes and pattern of cerebral dominance, people
may find it difficult to switch from one type of behaviour to the other,
even when that would be useful. The key to this problem is to be
aware of it and to have some strategy in the form of learning aids that
compensate for the weak faculty.
Here are some examples of strategies.
‘Left-siders’: ‘Right-siders’:
For both:
Simply getting both sides to share their insights and explain
them to each other in a discussion group may be enough to
make up any important deficits.
Personality types
This model argues that our personality tendencies help to determine
how we prefer to learn. The model can help us discover how to select
the best learning techniques for individual personality types. Current
literature on this subject indicates that there are four major
personality types, though these can be further sub-divided using
various combinations.
People may be primarily:
z extroverted (outgoing) or introverted (shy)
z sensing (favour data from using the five senses) or intuitive
(favouring instinctual responses)
z thinking or feeling
z judging or perceiving.
It is important to note that these personality types are tendencies,
rather than being permanently fixed. The learning facilitator can use
an understanding of these types to interact with individual learners
and be sensitive to their personality, varying the interaction and the
learning support accordingly.
Sensory mode
We also seem to have preferred sensory modes for learning.
These are:
z auditory (ear-gate) learners who process information better when
it comes through the ears, for example through tapes, films,
videos and small group discussions
z visual (eye-gate) learners who prefer to see or read information ,
for example in the form of charts and diagrams
z kinaesthetic (event/activity) learners who learn best by physical
activity, being actively involved or preferring practical
demonstrations.
By being sensitive to these differences and using as many sensory
channels as possible, learning facilitators can:
z optimise learning opportunities
z give equal importance to different learner preferences
z reinforce learning by enabling cross referencing from channel to
channel.
Now turn to Reading 6: ‘Learning styles’.
This reading looks at personality types, brain dominance and sensory
mode. It also looks at overall learning style, which we will return to
later in the unit.
Activity 6.1
(about one hour to observe the group, plus about 30 minutes
for discussion and writing)
Observe a group of learners. They might be in a classroom
situation, or a group of young people with whom you are
working.
Describe as far as you can the personality type and sensory
mode preferences for at least six learners. Then do the same
for yourself.
Discuss this with other friends, co-workers and/or tutorial
group) and then make notes in your learning journal.
Multiple intelligences
People vary enormously in their skills and capability. Intelligence
testing and related subjects are part of the history of the attempt to
understand these variations. The intelligence testing tradition is based
on the idea that our ability to deal with problems in the real world
depends on underlying general abilities in perception and reasoning.
But one of the problems with traditional intelligence tests (IQ tests) is
the assumption that there is a single universal factor – a general
intelligence – and that intelligence is determined by your genes. This
view does not allow the possibility of raising the level of people who
do badly in traditional intelligence tests. Also, these tests do not
Unit 6
measure emotional intelligence or people intelligence.
However, there are theories and models that are much closer to the
rich and complex abilities of young people than the IQ model.
Howard Gardner (1983) argues that our experience of the real world
tells us that intelligence is not unitary, but multiple. When we develop
the capacities of young people through project work, we need to be
able to analyse how well they adapt their thinking and behaviour to
the tasks that face them in order to know how to help them. A unitary
view of intelligence is not helpful for that, whereas a ‘multiple
intelligences’ model is.
Intelligence is the mental process by which we understand the
situation we are in and deal with it. Gardner argues that:
z Each of us has available for use seven (or more) quite different
kinds of intelligence and each one tends to generate a different
learning style.
z All of these intelligences need to be equally valued.
Visual/spatial
Visual/spatial intelligence involves being able to deal intellectually
with visual problems and to look at other problems and create mental
images to analyse them. This is especially valuable with visual arts,
navigation, architecture and certain games such as chess, where the
logical structures of the game are overlaid by powerful visual
patterns.
Verbal/linguistic
Verbal/linguistic intelligence relates to words and language. We use
this intelligence to formulate our understanding of situations in
listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Musical/rhythmic
Musical/rhythmic intelligence includes the ability to recognise and
create tonal and rhythmic patterns and structures, and to formulate
their expression in musical notation. It includes mentally processing
environmental sounds, the human voice and musical instruments.
Logical/mathematical
Logical/mathematical intelligence deals with the analysis and
construction of patterns of symbolic information, using propositional
thought patterns.
Bodily/kinaesthetic
Bodily/kinaesthetic intelligence is the ability to use the body so that it
expresses emotion(s) and ideas, plays sports, and deploys the ability
to interpret and invoke effective body language. It deals primarily
with physical activities and kinaesthetic learning experiences.
Interpersonal
Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand and manipulate
person-to-person relationships. It includes the ability to communicate
with others and to participate in group activities.
Intrapersonal
Intrapersonal intelligence is based on understanding and managing
the self. With respect to learning facilitation, it concerns the attention
needed by a person who is engaged in independent study rather than
group study or group work.
Naturalist
Naturalist intelligence consists of the underlying general intellectual
abilities that are embodied in the work of the farmer, countryman
and so on. It enables human beings to recognise, categorise and utilise
the natural environment. Gardner (1999: 48) uses the concept to
mean a combination of ‘the core abilities with a characterization of
the role...’
Unit 6
Gunawardena.
At this point, read only Section 1 Intelligence Testing and Section 2
Multiple Intelligences, for a fuller discussion of the topics we have
just covered. You can come back to the ideas in the reading later if
you find them difficult to digest straightaway.
Section 3 of Reading 7 is about SI theory, which we discuss a little
later in this unit. You will have the opportunity to read that section
then.
Activity 6.2
Try to identify which of the multiple intelligences tend to
dominate in you.
Which of these intelligences can you identify among your
friends and family?
What evidence do you base your judgement on?
Write notes in your learning journal.
Operations
Evaluation
Convergent production
Divergent production
Memory
Cognition
Unit 6
z visual information
z auditory information (these two he originally categorised as one
type called ‘figural content’)
z symbolic information, such as numbers or musical notation
z semantic information, which is carried in forms of language
whose meaning has to be processed
z behavioural knowledge, which is where he locates social and
emotional intelligence.
Therefore, the learner may be operating in any one or more of the five
areas of knowledge and may be processing the information by one or
more of five types of thinking. The learner’s ability to do so will
depend on underlying abilities to deal with what Guilford has
classified into six kinds of products:
z units
z classes
z relations
z systems
z transformations
z implications.
It can be argued that although genetic inheritance undoubtedly has
some part to play in determining the basis of our intelligence, there is
no evidence that it sets definable limits to our intelligence. It may
influence our early intellectual preferences and affect our interests, but
we should use whatever evidence we find of our thinking and build
the new thinking we need onto that. The methods of even the best
intelligence tests or models are very crude in understanding the
intellectual power we have. We should be much more concerned with
using psychological and physiological insights to generate strategies
that will raise people’s intelligence to a high level. The SI model tells
us that even if only one of these factors is at all developed, we can use
that factor to connect up with other factors, to raise the level of the
whole information processing structure of the intellect.
Read the following case study and do the self-help question. This
section gives a more detailed explanation of SI theory, illustrated by
the example of a playgroup leader and how she uses her behavioural
intelligence.
Unit 6
unit.
From what you have learned in this unit, you will be able to see that
an overall learning style is a combination of many factors. Next, we
look at two models, each with four learning styles.
The four styles in Model 1 are:
z relational
z analytical
z structured
z energetic.
This model was described in Reading 6, where you read about how
these factors co-relate to produce four overall types of learners, as
described in the table below. (You may want to look again at the
section on Overall learning style in Reading 6 now.)
Unit 6
z concentrates more on rote z tries to solve problems,
learning search for new ideas,
z tries to succeed by only experiment
doing what is necessary. z is a keen competitor
z plays a visible role, asserts
leadership
z gets involved with others
in learning.
Activity 6.3
(about 20 minutes)
Look again at the descriptions of characteristics of different
types of learners. Can you place yourself in either of these two
overall learning style models:
z relational / analytical / structured / energetic?
z analytic / imaginative / common sense / dynamic?
Give examples of ways you have learned that illustrate your
style. Perhaps your overall style of learning is a composite of
more than one learner type.
Discuss this with others (co-workers and/or tutorial group) and
then make notes in your learning journal.
Since people differ in the way they think, process information and
solve problems, how are we going to meet all our learners needs?
Obviously, we cannot facilitate learners if we stick to one narrow
method. Good teaching and training satisfy learner needs, and this
includes accommodating different learning preferences and adopting
a variety of strategies. For example, the learner who does not like
reading can be satisfied through discussion or through practical
activity.
In this distance education Diploma, you are given a variety of
activities: reading, observing, case study analysis, hands-on practical
application, reflecting on your own experiences, gathering
information and discussing with others. The variety should enable
you to find ways that suit your intellectual development best.
Activity 6.4
(about 20 minutes)
Think back to a situation where you have received training as a
facilitator, and describe the various settings, for example,
classroom, workshop, lecture, small group discussion, distance
education modules.
1 What sort of learning activity was used in each setting?
2 What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of
each?
3 Which activities do you prefer?
Discuss this with others (co-workers and/or tutorial group) and
then make notes in your learning journal.
From the last activity, you may have discovered what training
strategies you prefer. Perhaps you like structured, sequential and
analytical presentations. Perhaps you prefer workshops to lectures.
Perhaps you choose highly imaginative and innovative activities, like
role-play or creative writing.
As a facilitator, you should use a mix of activities so that the learning
appeals to all learners. You can become a versatile learning facilitator
by trying various facilitating and instructional roles and using
contrasting activities:
z logical presentations/descriptions with analogies and anecdotes
z different sensory modes (auditory, visual, kinaesthetic)
Unit 6
z concrete illustrations to make concepts less abstract
z practical illustrations, related to real life situations
z freedom to experiment, explore ideas
z plenty of collaborative planning
z an environment with diverse activities (reading, writing,
observing, analysing, teamwork tasks, role-playing, games,
explorations).
Participation is the key word. As the Chinese philosopher Confucius
said in around 450 BC:
‘I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.’
Metacognition
Metacognition means being aware of how you learn, and the
importance of controlling that process. Being able to identify your
own learning preferences, and overall learning style, can help you to
learn more effectively.
As a learning facilitator, you can help learners to learn by developing
their awareness of their own learning preferences and overall learning
styles, and their special intellectual qualities and how they can build
new learning on these individual characteristics.
Stereotypes
Traditionally, many cultures have sex-role stereotypes of learning.
Explore them by doing the activity given below. (There is more on
this in Module 5 Gender and Development).
Activity 6.5
(about 30 minutes, plus interview time)
In your learning journal, write down some sex-role stereotyped
ideas about learning, under the headings:
Make notes about what you think are the origins of differences
in expectations for women and men. How do you think the
patterns of social expectations for both genders affect their
learning?
Interview some women colleagues to find out the factors that
they feel have hindered their learning.
Write your responses in your learning journal.
Unit 6
analytical; men are slightly more undirected, women tend to be more
organised. Additionally, men have often been noted to dominate
discussions as well as group work. However, be very cautious with
any such generalisations. Use them only to help people develop in
areas in which they may be weak.
Socio-economic differences
Socio-economic differences, too, may hinder or facilitate learning. For
example, people from more socially disadvantaged groups tend to
have poorer verbal ability in standard and high status language styles.
This may make it difficult for them to grasp abstract and complex
concepts when these are not made clear by preliminary exploration.
They can, however, very rapidly acquire expertise in such styles as the
work of Mrs Pyrah’s children showed (see Unit 3, Case study 3.1).
There may be bias against more socially disadvantaged groups in
assessment and testing.
Ethnicity
Ethnicity may influence learning, since some cultures value
individual achievement and competition highly, while other cultures
value the group’s achievements more than those of the individual. In
some ethnic groups, the seclusion of women or religious beliefs may
affect active engagement in some learning activities.
Activity 6.6
(about 20 minutes)
Discuss this case study and the issues it raises with others
(friends, family, co-workers and/or tutorial group). The write
your responses to the following questions in your learning
journal.
1 Do you think that Ameena was right or wrong when she
refused to dance in front of male colleagues? Give reasons
for your answers.
2 Do you agree with the stand taken by the instructor and
the principal? If you do not agree, what alternatives would
you suggest?
Activity 6.7
(about 30 minutes)
Review what you have learned in this unit about learning
styles. Make notes about the following questions:
z How has it helped increase your understanding of how
adults learn?
z How can you apply your learning in practice?
z How have your ideas now changed about how you and
other people learn?
Unit 6
Unit summary
To check how you have got on, look back at the learning outcomes
for this unit and see if you can now do them. When you have done
this, look through your learning journal to remind yourself of what
you have learned and the ideas you have generated.
In the next unit we look at how better to facilitate adult learning and
at designing, implementing and evaluating programmes.
Unit 6
were clearly very skilled with basic arithmetical processes and with
the representation of money in terms of coins and notes of two
denominations (old and new, which involved transforming from one
to the other mentally). They also broke numbers down into
constituent parts and moved the parts around to make adding and
subtracting easier. They could also map these operations into sets of
specific items and classes of food.
The traders are powerful convergent processors, memorisers and
evaluators of visual items (units) and classes (of food and coins and
notes). They understand the visual relationships between them and
the transformations between visual denominations of notes, and at
least part of the system of numbers represented by the visual money.
This is a pretty sophisticated set of information processing abilities.
However, it is limited at the moment to the visual domain.
To become adept at school maths, their abilities need to be moved
much more firmly away from the visual content into the area of
symbolic content, so that they become equally adept at convergent
References
Unit 6
Unit 7: Facilitating
adult learning
Unit 7
Module 1: Learning Processes
Unit introduction
When you have worked through this unit, you should be able to:
z explain the processes of communication and participation in
adult learning
z outline stages in developing a learning programme and apply
your learning to:
o develop objectives
o select learning strategies Unit 7
o choose resources
o implement the programme
z explain why evaluation matters and how and when it should be
carried out
z reflect on your learning from this module.
Communication
Adult learning is not a process of one-way communication, where a
facilitator only transmits knowledge to students who are expected to
absorb that knowledge.
The last unit of this module is a good moment to reflect on the
learning principles that underpin this Diploma.
Reading 9: ‘Principles that underpin the learning on the Diploma’
explores these principles. It is taken from the first Tutor’s Manual for
the Diploma and was meant as advice for those who were facilitating
the Diploma programme.
You can read it now, or at the end of the unit if you prefer.
As you read, think about the following questions:
How far do you think the principles outlined in the reading are
apparent in this module? How far has this reading helped you reflect
better on the module content and process of your learning through
the module?
Feed in
Feed out
Feed back
Three-way communication
Organisation Input
Activity Output
Activity 7.1
(about 30 minutes)
When you have read the case study, describe the ways in which
it matches (or doesn’t match) the seven-step model above.
Then answer the following question.
What learning strategies would you have planned to help the
mothers to learn the use of numerals from 1 to 5 and the use
of a ruler?
Discuss this with others (friends, co-workers and/or tutorial
group) and then make notes in your learning journal.
Facilitator as mentor
In Unit 6, we emphasised the importance of flexible teaching styles to
suit learning preferences. We also emphasised the importance of
learner participation in all aspects of the learning process, including
planning. The facilitator has to find ways of involving the learners in
the whole process so that the content, pace, intensity, application and
environment of learning are controlled by the ethos of the learning
group, rather than by the strength of the facilitator’s plan and force of
her personality.
Therefore, the role of the learning facilitator is ideally that of a
mentor.
What is a mentor?
In Homer’s long poem, The Odyssey, the Gods intervene throughout
the story of the return of the Greek lord and warrior Odysseus from
the war of the Greeks with the city of Troy, to his own island home
of Ithaca. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, takes the form of a
mentor for Odyssey’s son, Telemakhos. The mentor guides
Telemakhos in his search for his father. She joins him initially in the
first part of the adventure, appearing when she is needed and
disappearing when she is not. Athena re-enters the scene at the end of
the adventure to help with further advice for Telemakhos, his father
and grandfather so that they can recapture their island home from
rival lords who had started to challenge for its ownership.
The mentor role is emphasised in the Kularnava Tanta, (an Indian
Vedic text) where six roles are assigned to a teacher. One of the six
roles is that of a ‘bodhaka’ – a person who lights a lamp in the mind
of the student. This suggests two main types of overlapping support
suggested for learners:
z Holding a lamp to illuminate the area of knowledge being
studied. This is in order to show learners the way if they cannot
find their own way through the learning material because they do
not have the appropriate mind set for it (the developed learning
schemata).
z Providing illumination, by way of examples and illustrations, so
that a light starts shining in the learner’s brain, making everything
that is to be learned very clear and assimilable as extensions to
their existing knowledge. This is the approach taken by the
mentor in Panchatantra, where this method was used in the
education of the five princes in The Arts of Stagecraft.
Developing objectives
You should now be able to generate a list of things that a group needs
to do. These can be written as general objectives for the group, then
converted into specific objectives that remind each learner what is
being aimed at. The next case study shows what this means.
breach of safety within my area of work and within the whole storage
and haulage centre.’
Aim/objective Definition
As you may have noticed, this Diploma uses the term ‘learning
outcomes’. There are ‘module learning outcomes’ (equivalent to the
‘general objectives’ in the case study above) and ‘unit learning
outcomes’ (which are ‘specific objectives’ about what you will learn Unit 7
in any particular unit).
Knowles has also provided a set of guidelines to assist adult educators
in translating needs into ‘programme’ or ‘project objectives’.
z Organise the needs into a priority system and break them down
into operational and educational categories:
o operational – establish needs for physical facilities, time-
scheduling, budgeting; take practical decisions and accept
shared responsibility (the learning contract may be used here)
o educational – list the educational needs and work toward
consensus in decision-making and formulating priorities.
Operational model
The operational five-step model that follows shows how programme
design can start once the objectives are mutually agreed upon. At this
stage, we have to concentrate on what the learners need (or want) to
learn rather than what we feel they should be taught. Adults learn
what they want to learn, and therefore the lessons and instructions
have to be planned in relation to the learners’ needs, interests and
values.
While sharing the planning process with the learners, you should also
bear in mind that some institutions or organisations may have their
own standards, controls, limitations and systems. They may require
the learning programme to be transmitted in a structured and
controlled manner. This has to be discussed with the learners so that
any ambiguities can be clarified, and a mutually agreed plan,
including the time-frame, can be drawn up.
Knowledge
The main strategies that are used to develop learning in the
‘knowledge domain’ are:
z lectures, talks and lessons
z discussions, seminars, colloquia, symposia.
z self-study methods.
Other useful strategies include:
z small-group study methods
z discovery learning through investigation and experiment
z examining case studies.
Unit 7
Activity 7.2
(timing depends on how long you spend on your observations)
Observe three facilitator-initiated group discussions in any
setting, and report your observations in your learning journal
under the following headings.
Activity Facilitator’s Learners’ Remarks
participation participation
1.
2.
3.
Activity 7.3
(You will probably need to spend at least an hour on
preparation and 30 minutes writing up the evaluation. Then
there is the time you allow for the group discussion and follow-
up evaluation discussion.)
1 Plan a group discussion in relation to your programme
under the following headings:
z objectives of the discussion
z additional material to be provided (e.g. handouts)
z learners’ participation
z facilitator’s participation
z evaluation procedures and evaluation form.
2 Conduct the (planned) discussion with a group of people.
3 Evaluate the discussion with the group and then make
some notes in your learning journal.
4 Discuss with co-workers and/or tutorial group.
Self-study methods
Self-study methods are also a useful way to develop learning in the
knowledge domain.
Skills
A lot of skills learning, such as social skills, involves acquiring new
knowledge too, but this can be introduced incidentally along the way
or separately, while the focus is on the skill or skills to be learned.
The main strategies that enhance learning in the skills domain are:
z demonstration/observation
z practical activities and exercises
z practice.
Other useful strategies include:
z discovery
z role-play
z simulation
z practising the ‘inner game’.
Demonstrations/ observation
Demonstrations are where the facilitator shows how a task is
performed step-by-step, gets the learners to do it and corrects them if Unit 7
necessary. They are the primary strategy for teaching skills. The
demonstration can be of two kinds:
z a demonstration of the whole skill sequence in real time or a
series of separate parts of the skill, focusing on the gestalt of the
skill sequence
z a demonstration of the sequence of stimulus/response units from
the skill chain, emphasising the stimulus/response relationships.
Video demonstrations are also useful, especially because they can
easily be stopped, repeated and discussed.
Once the skills of the task are mastered, the learners are encouraged
to work independently, under the overall guidance of the facilitator,
until they reach the required skill standards, with frequent topping up.
Practice
Systematic practice is necessary to develop a skill to a required level
of competence. The nature and timing of this are important. For
some complex skills like acting, the practice is better when the
practice periods are widely spaced so that the learning has time to
become organised and stored by the brain. For simpler skills, where
precision matters greatly, such as potting snooker balls, it is better to
practise them intensively.
While practice can be take place in realistic settings, it can also be
acquired in quasi-realistic contexts. For example, many computer
games can be used to develop the fine muscular co-ordination and
timing needed to operate a computer skilfully, and for the sustained
experience necessary to become computer literate. The value of this is
that the skills learned are not experienced as chores: they are simply
acquired non-consciously, without the learner experiencing the strain
of being focused upon.
Attitudes
As with skills learning, acquiring attitudes also involves acquiring
new knowledge. This can be introduced incidentally, while the focus
is on other things, or focused on separately. For example, if your
group members want to move into non-traditional social roles, such
as when moving out of rural areas to work in urban settings, they
may need to adapt their attitudes to the behaviour of women. To
achieve this they will need to understand the social conditions of
women in urban settings and the way these conditions impose specific
demands on attitudes and behaviour. One of the ways this can be
treated is by the analysis and discussion of local television dramas
that highlight rural/urban clashes of values. This can then be
accompanied by role-plays and improvised sketches so that the
acquired attitudes develop around specific patterns of social
interaction.
The main strategies that enhance learning in the domain of attitudes
acquisition are:
z case studies
z drama (role-play, street drama, etc).
Other useful strategies include:
z simulations
z discussion
z observation.
Case studies
You have been presented with case studies throughout this module.
The television dramas mentioned above are effectively case studies,
though we tend to define case studies as real examples of the
behaviours being studied. Essentially, they are narrations or detailed
descriptions of actual happenings, structured to expose the underlying
issues in a factual manner. The learners are readily provided with
excellent opportunities to develop problem-solving skills and their
own capacity for diagnosis and analysis. Case studies can be used for
individual and/or group study.
This is a method that has been in use from early times in the form of
community discussion of traditional stories such as Aesop’s Fables,
Jataka stories, the Panchatantra, the Holy Bible stories, stories and
incidents contained in the Holy Quoran, or the Arabian Nights.
Drama
The use of drama (in the form of role-plays, simulations, skits, or
reading and acting short plays) is a very powerful way of exposing
and demonstrating attitudes, and practising alternative behaviours.
Drama can be used to depict real life or hypothetical situations. The
two main uses of dramas of this sort are:
z socio-drama, where the focus is on the study of social
relationships learners may experience
z psycho-drama, where the focus is on the psychological issues
learners need to understand.
The learners themselves do most of the play-acting. Having described
and discussed a situation to be explored, the facilitator usually
prepares cards with notes for the learners who will play the acted
roles, and cards with observation notes for the observers who will
analyse what happens. After the role-play, the facilitator uses it as
data for an active discussion to highlight the learning points and
consolidate them in the minds of the learners. Any point that needs
extra exploration can be tackled by repeating bits of the role-play as
stimulus for new thinking.
Real projects
These are real assignments, for example community development,
environmental or health projects. They provide opportunities for
participants to learn knowledge, skills and attitudes that are relevant
to real tasks or jobs, and that are transferable to other situations, for
example employment. The learning strategies described above are
valuable for use alongside a project’s main activities to expose and
explore issues that are obscure in the project itself. That was one of
the main techniques used by Paolo Freire in Brazil, when his groups
of illiterate peasants made pictures or representations of their
economic plight, so that it could be worked on intellectually before
acting on it politically.
Hypothetical projects
These are models of the process of working on real projects. They
take the form of assignments that are given to learners to be
completed individually or in groups, in class, at home or in the field.
The learners have to use the model given to practice applying the
knowledge they already have. They find any other information
required from books, friends or peers, and report on their findings.
This process helps them to consolidate and refine their application of
knowledge, skills and attitudes.
Now turn to Reading 10: Learning strategies’, by Dr G.
Gunawardena.
Activity 7.4
(about 30 minutes)
This activity gives you the opportunity to apply what you have
just read about learning strategies and projects.
Describe briefly a real project you are familiar with. Identify
what opportunities it offered for participants to acquire
knowledge, skills and attitudes and list what you think they
learned through it. Can you think of ways of improving the
learning strategies used?
If you can’t think of a real life example you can invent a Unit 7
hypothetical project.
Make notes in your learning journal.
Resources
Human resources
The learners themselves, their family members, friends, and the
formal and informal leaders of a community can become valuable
human resources. The facilitator must develop skills in identifying
and utilising them. Adults have a wealth of experience and skills that
learning facilitators can use. Religious leaders, teachers, doctors,
lawyers, technicians, traders, craftsmen, artists, musicians, extension
agents and law enforcement officers can be human resources that can
be used in learning programmes.
They can provide organisational support, share experiences that
would be useful as learning material, and do many more things to
help the facilitator. The facilitator has to identify such resources, with
the help of the learners, at the needs identification and programme
design stages.
Environmental resources
The natural environment can be used as a resource to focus attention
on many social and psychological issues. It provides many features
and incidents that can draw out useful lessons that can change the
attitudes of the learners.
For example, a visit to a hilly clearing where soil erosion has taken
place can stimulate more learning about environmental problems
than a classroom lecture or discussion on soil erosion. Nevertheless,
you have to prepare carefully for such a visit or it is unlikely to focus
the learning sufficiently.
green and that the others were not. A very lively discussion ensued,
that explored thoroughly the nature of definitions.
Learning aids
Learning aids (also sometimes called ‘engineered resources’) are
extremely useful in facilitating adult learning. They can be designed
to make learning a pleasant experience, if properly and appropriately
used. They can engage more than one sense, which enhances
learning. But facilitators need to ensure that learning aids are used to
make learning more effective, and that they don’t disturb or distract
the learner.
A large range of learning aids are available today, such as those listed
below.
Audio-visual aids
z cinematic film
z computer packages
z DVD players
z film strip and tape
z interactive multimedia products
z online resources
z overhead projectors(with transparencies and presenter)
z PowerPoint
z slide presentations with presenter
z slide/tape combinations
z television
z video
Activity 7.5
(about 45 minutes)
1 Prepare a chalkboard or whiteboard plan (what you hope
to write on the board and where) for a session you hope to
conduct for your group of learners. In your plan, indicate
the topic of the session and the type of learners.
2 Assume that you have decided to prepare a poster on the
dangers of smoking, and that it will be used at a learning
session for a youth club. (For example, you could use the
picture of a burning cigarette placed over the lungs of a
person and use the words: ‘Burn yourself to death’.)
Prepare a sketch of the poster and show it to a friend or
co-worker to get his feedback.
3 Plan some open-ended questions to generate discussion
about a documentary video that you would like to show a
group of learners.
Make notes about your plans for these three tasks in your
learning journal. Add comments about whether you find this
kind of task easy or difficult.
Implementation
Initial arrangements
Often, the designer or the facilitator of the learning programme may
not be the person in charge of implementing learning sessions. Others
will help in the physical arrangements, provision of learning
materials, provision of funds, enrolling of learners, selection of
resource people and many other activities. All of them should be
aware of the factors that facilitate adult learning.
You might be in the role of supporting someone else who is
implementing the programme. The self-help question that follows will
help you think about what this involves.
This unit has taken you through a process from involving learners in
the initial feed-in stage, through programme design, with choice of
learning strategies and resources, to implementation. So by the end,
how do you know if you have done well? The next section looks at
evaluation.
Evaluation
Why evaluate?
Evaluation is the process of finding out whether the learning needs
have been fulfilled.
In formal teaching situations, evaluations tend to be done to find out
whether the student has learned what was taught. These take the
form of assessments rather than evaluations. In non-formal adult
learning programmes, evaluations are done to find out whether the
facilitators have functioned effectively and the programme has
achieved its objectives. Unit 7
Evaluations provide one form of feedback to the designers and
facilitators of the learning programme. The results of all feedback
must indicate whether the programme has been successful or not.
If it has not happened as intended, the designers and facilitators of
the programme have to analyse the feedback to find out when, why
and how things went wrong, with the participation of the learners.
They are the participants in the programme and therefore they are the
best people to indicate its usefulness, impact and effectiveness.
Evaluation activities also help the learners to think. They have to
think about themselves in terms of their response to the programme.
The whole programme itself should be evaluated as a total
experience, though any single learning unit could be used for a partial
evaluation.
There may be other advantages that are not be measured by tests and
examinations, but that do emerge through the evaluation of
programmes.
For example the learners may:
z learn some useful skills, intended or not intended by the
facilitator
z learn to communicate more effectively with each other in small
groups
z overcome some insecurities (for example, shyness, stage fright,
failure to listen, tardiness, that would help them to become better
citizens)
z learn how to share problems and solve them using participatory
processes
z learn to relate to others in a positive manner.
When to evaluate
Evaluation should not be a series of tests given at regular intervals. It
can happen at any time in the programme, if the learners agree to
participate. It can happen:
z while the learning session is going on (for example, to find out
whether the arrangements are all right, or whether the words
used by the facilitator are clear, audible and easy to understand)
z at the end of a session through open responses to questions by
the facilitator or observations made by the learners on the
outcome of the learning activities and/or projects
z at the end of the programme as may be required by the institution
sponsoring or managing the programme
z after a period of time has elapsed as follow up evaluation to
measure how the learners are applying the results of the
programme.
How to evaluate
Many sophisticated methods and instruments have been developed
for assessing formal learning, for example exams and questionnaires.
In non-formal participatory evaluation, however, simple and easy to
use methods have to be adopted.
Some such evaluation methods are:
z open responses from learners to pre-prepared questions
z open comments from learners
z learners testing themselves
z small group discussions
z suggestions from learners at the end of the session
z learners’ evaluation committee
z regular (daily, weekly, monthly) evaluation sessions
z checklists for self-evaluation
z follow-up visits to learners’ projects or homes.
At the end of this unit, which is the last unit in this module, it is time
to reflect and bring your learning together – to do a self-evaluation.
If you did not read Reading 9 ‘Principles that underpin the learning
on the Diploma’ at the start of this unit, read it now, before you do
the final activity.
Activity 7.6
Look through your learning journal activities. Sum up how your
knowledge, skills and attitudes have changed since you began
the module. What have you learned that was surprising or
unexpected? What do you plan to do differently in future –
both as a youth development worker and as an adult learner
yourself, when you come to study further modules?
Make final notes in your learning journal.
Unit 7
Unit summary
You have also reflected on your own learning during this module.
To check how you have got on, look back at the learning outcomes
for this unit and see if you can now do them. When you have done
this, look through your learning journal to remind yourself of what
you have learned and the ideas you have generated.
Unit 7
References
Module summary
The aim of this module has been to introduce you to the theory and
processes of learning as they relate to adult learning and youth
development work. It has focused on your role as a youth
development worker and learning facilitator, capable of choosing the
appropriate strategies and techniques in your work.
If you have successfully completed this module, you should now be
able to:
z understand the probable nature of the learning process and be
able to relate relevant theories of learning to the kinds of learners
for whom you are a learning facilitator
z understand what is presently understood about the learning
processes of adults and be able confidently to address the issues
that affect adult learners
z discuss the philosophical and psychological perspectives of
‘education for all’ and the concepts of total development and
lifelong learning, and some of the different theories about how
learning takes place
z determine what kinds of factors are likely to help and hinder
learning and be able to help the learners deal with these factors
z support learners in their efforts to learn and/or train, in the light
of what can be determined about their modes of intelligence and
preferred learning styles
z use the knowledge and skills of informal education and
experiential learning that you have learned in this module to
prepare effective learning environments for adults.
We hope you have found this module interesting and useful as an
introduction to adult learning. Good luck with your assignment,
which draws on the work and activities that you have completed
during the module.
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Glossary
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learning.
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before.
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Further reading
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Assignments
Assignment 1
Assignment 1 consists of two parts and counts for 50 per cent towards
your final assessment in this module
Part A
Talk informally to a group of young people to find out about their
learning experiences (focusing specifically on factors that have
facilitated and hindered their learning), then write a short essay
(approximately 750 words) on your findings in the light of your
understanding after studying this module.
Part B
Work with the same group of young people to prepare an outline plan
(approximately 1,000 words) for a programme of experiential
learning.
1 Describe the situation.
2 Describe the participants.
3 Identify the needs.
4 Describe the broad aims and objectives of the
programme/project.
5 State some of the strategies you would use to encourage informal
learning, co-operation and participation in the exercise.
6 Develop an action plan.
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Assignment 2
Assignment 3
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Readings
The readings in this section will help you develop your understanding
of Module 1 Learning Processes. The reading numbers, their titles
and author(s) and the unit in which they appear are listed below.
1 ‘The automatic systems in the mind’
by Dr G. Gunawardena (Unit 1) ........................................233
2 ‘Scaffolding and the zone of proximal development’
by Dr G. Gunawardena (Unit 1) ........................................236
3 ‘Key learning theories’ by Dr G. Gunawardena
Revised 2007 by Lewis Owen (Unit 1) ...............................238
4 ‘The nature of knowledge’
by Dr G. Gunawardena (Unit 3) ........................................258
5 ‘Oral traditions and rules of evidence’
by G.Custred (Unit 4)........................................................263
6 ‘Learning styles’ by Clay Johnston and Carol J. Orwig)
(Unit 6) ............................................................................269
7 ‘Understanding intelligence: multiple intelligences and
the structure of intellect (SI) theory of intelligence’
by Dr G. Gunawardena (Unit 6) ........................................278
8 ‘Pacific perspectives on learning: Pacific thinking styles’
by Ana Maui Taufe’ulungaki (Unit 6) ...............................289
9 ‘Commonwealth Diploma in Youth in Development Work:
Tutor’s Manual’ (Unit 7) ...................................................292
10 ‘Learning strategies’ by Dr. G. Gunawardena (Unit 7) ........297
Readings
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Learning to crawl
The infant learning to crawl is most interesting. This appears
superficially to be spontaneous, but if you look carefully at an infant
you can see a strong element of trial and error (which is almost
deliberate). What seems to happen is that the child has a neurological
pre-disposition to try out crawling in this way – it seems programmed
to do so.
When a certain amount of experience of crawling has taken place,
then it seems that an automatic system in the brain is switched on,
and all the movements from then on are absorbed into this system
and crawling becomes competent and unconscious. From the
moment that the automatic system is switched on, all the additional
crawling knowledge (skill) is acquired at lightning fast speed.
Learning to talk
The case of the infant learning to talk (or learning its mother tongue)
is surprisingly similar to the first example. We know that children
don’t actually learn what their parents tell them to say, but what their
parents, grandparents or carers say and do seem to cause children to
start experimenting with language.
What’s most interesting though is that the things they hear from their
parents seem to trigger off underlying patterns of grammar which are
different from the speech of the parents but very useful to the
children’s mastery of the principles of the adult language. Like the
crawling infant the newly talking infant seems to develop through a
series of experimental activities which have been triggered by a
perception of what’s going on around her.
Those experimental activities of making sounds, as with crawling,
seem to trigger off the development of a mental system, or grammar,
which, by the age of five, is effectively the skeleton and a lot of the
flesh of the complete language. Once the automatic language
acquisition system is activated, the grammar seems to develop very
rapidly, as long as the child is listening to language and preferably
engaged in conversations. This process seems to be lifelong, in that we
are always developing more and more aspects of our language.
The continued process of language acquisition seems to be paralleled
by the increased complexity of physical movement that we can do.
After about five or six, we can develop skills of dancing, football,
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speak in the target language until they feel that it’s not awkward to do
so.
What usually happens is that they start using the odd word or phrase
of the target language embedded in their natural speech. After a while
they start talking in a sort of ‘baby talk’, but soon that becomes fluent
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and natural, though maybe at first at quite a simple level. The basics
of the new language become more or less automatic. In other words,
the learner develops a natural mental grammar for the target language
and will be able to use it for thinking creatively, rather than translating
into mother tongue.
What happens when one learns through this method is probably
similar to what happens when we learn our mother tongue as a child.
We know it works as a method of acquiring a new language or a new
aspect of one’s own mother tongue (such as the language of
Sociology or the language of Business).
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over and over, and the skill would come back. The skill is internalised
in the brain; it just needs re-awakening.
Ian Wright had suggested a way of tapping into the automatic
kinaesthetic system, which is driven by mental as much as physical
processes.
If you try and analyse very skilled technique too closely you can
confuse yourself, because it’s too complex to analyse fully. However,
once the overall pattern of a skill is clear, the automatic system will
be triggered.
Knowledge construction
The automatic system is a system of knowledge construction not a
system of knowledge recording. The mind constructs a system for
learning to crawl or talk because it understands the meaning of the
situation, and because it has an innate capacity for constructing a
learning system. The automatic systems of the human mind seem to
consist of rules (experienced as intuitions) that help us to build up a
picture or a structure to represent a particular idea, and each one of
us builds these up differently though we all use the same underlying
general rules.
What has been focused on here is the brain’s language-forming ability,
but obviously maths is similar. There is a good argument also that
music and the visual artistic sense are similar, and that social skills are
similar. The linguist Noam Chomsky argues as well that the brain
probably has a science-forming faculty.
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Lev Vygotsky
In the 1920s, Lev Vygotsky discovered that, although the
development of language, once it’s begun, is automatic, it requires
human interaction or quasi-interaction for it to develop properly.
The nature of the interaction powerfully affects the surface form of
the spoken language (not the deep level rules), and the form of the
spoken language powerfully affects the development of thought.
Marx, with his concept of praxis, and Freire argued that thought and
practice must be closely interlinked for change to take place.
Scaffolding
Vygotsky’s ideas have been used to develop a model for this process;
we call it ‘scaffolding’. In other words a structure erected out of a lot
of small elements to support the building inside. In this case that
building is the mind, and the small elements are the words and
interactions of friends, teachers, family or whatever, which form a
supportive mental structure that allows the thought inside to be built
up to the next level of complexity.
Exploratory talking
Douglas Barnes, from Leeds University, in his marvellous little book,
From Communication to Curriculum (Penguin, 1976), describes the
different ways in which educators can use group talking methods for
intellectual development. These methods are particularly valuable for
youths and adults especially in poorer countries because here, from
childhood people are usually well socialised into talking in groups
and have no uneasiness about it.
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Behaviourist
Classical conditioning
In a behaviourist analysis of learning, the idea is that we learn
primarily by responding to external conditions.
Behaviourists (such as Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndike, John B.
Watson, Edwin Guthrie and Burrhus F. Skinner) didn’t really
consider what goes on inside the mind of the learner. Because they
felt that the inside workings of the learner’s mind couldn’t be seen or
known, they described it as a ‘black box’. They felt that they could
only infer what appears to take place when learning occurs.
Their main research into the basic building blocks of human learning
was based on the assumption that they must develop blocks in a very
similar way to that of learned behaviour in animals (i.e. around the
basic responses to their environment). When observed closely, they
found that these basic responses take place in small steps or units,
which soon become linked together into chains of continuous activity.
The responses are caused by stimuli in the environment which trigger
behavioural responses in an animal, for example, observable when
creatures such as rats move in small, rapid, jerky, movements when
they explore their environment. In many animals, movements are in
small, clearly marked steps. Around these response units, permanent
patterns of behaviour are formed (behaviourist theories are
sometimes called ‘stimulus-response theories’), as when rats convert
these units of movement into continuous running or fighting.
black box
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Operant conditioning
Among human beings, behaviourist learning techniques are usually
based on the principles of operant conditioning. Here, people are
essentially free to choose their behaviours. These behaviours are
emitted more spontaneously than in classical conditioning. Operant
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Cognitivist learning
In contrast to the behaviourists, who were more concerned with how
learner’s behavioural responses to external conditions were
structured, cognitivist theorists (such as the German Gestalt
psychologists, the American Edward Chase Tolman and the Swiss
Jean Piaget) wanted to know more about the processes that go on in
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Gestalt theory
The essence of cognitive theories of learning is to be found in the
work of the German gestaltists on perception. These scientists
discovered that, when we are faced with a confusing environment full
of stimuli that is difficult to sort out, then there is an apparently
innate tendency of the brain to construct our perception into
relatively simple, well-ordered meaningful patterns (gestalts). Think
of your own experience of losing your sense of where you are on a
very dark night, and you will see how quickly you use your brain to
construct and establish a view of what is around you. You bring a
new order into your perception that allows you to balance your
responses and to act appropriately. You may of course construct an
inaccurate view and put yourself into difficulty. But you can’t help
performing this structuring. This is why gestaltists assumed that the
process is innate, though it may be that these structuring processes are
learned but on the basis of innate general tendencies. Nevertheless, it
argues that here is clear evidence of internal mental structure with
very deep roots in the formation of the brain.
Indeed, you will have realised that what has already been said so far
in this module assumes that much of our learning is guided by mental
strategies, constructed patterns, and hypotheses that we use to try out
our understanding, as well as by a recognition of (or a search for)
order and meaning in our experiences. These are the concerns of
cognitive psychology. As you will see from the rest of the module, we
advocate learning methods that, to a significant degree, derive from
this view: methods such as discovery learning, process-oriented
learning, relying on internal motivation, networked learning and
student choice. The mental events that learners need to be involved in
are thinking for themselves, developing tools for acquiring knowledge,
problem-solving and organising their knowledge.
In essence, cognitivist theories of learning look at three things:
z types of learning or knowledge
z information processing and memory
z metacognition (awareness of the self as a learner; capacity to
understand and monitor one’s own cognitive processes).
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Types of knowledge
z two to seven
z seven to twelve
z twelve onwards.
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Between the ages of seven and twelve, children develop the ability to
think logically and develop mental maps of their knowledge. This
knowledge is centred on the concrete features of the world, and
Piaget says that it consists of ‘concrete operations’. In other words,
they think in terms of real-world activities that can be observed. So
for example, learning arithmetic is best done by using actual objects,
such as coins and notes, or an abacus. Piaget argues that only in the
final stage, usually after the age of twelve, do full-scale ‘formal
operations’ develop, when children can master more abstract thought
and become able to think just in terms of concepts, rather than
concrete examples. This eventually grows into the ability to handle
deductive and propositional reasoning.
Modern theorists and investigators, while accepting the general value
of the model, have criticised it for its research methods, which failed
to discover the truth that children can in fact be far in advance of the
developmental stages that Piaget constructed, usually through the
quality of their social experience, which Vygotsky’s work shows to be
so crucial.
For youth development workers, it is important to realise that their
young clients may well not have developed their formal operations
very extensively and may well have to be allowed to think in concrete
operational terms – expressing all their ideas in concrete, real world
examples, and then using discussion and other representational
activities, such as drawing diagrams, to enable them to make the
transition to formal, abstract thinking. In fact, we ourselves, in some
areas of our work (such as writing difficult research reports) are not
fully operational in formal terms and have to think through our
material in concrete, real world terms. And we assume that this may
well be true for you, and would encourage you to represent what you
think in terms that make sense to you.
Cognitive domains
In the period after the second world war, cognitivist interest not only
concerned itself with epistemological issues but with using the
essential insights of the field in programmes of instruction and
education. Underpinning much of this work was a similar vision to
that of the behaviourists: that human learning could be massively
improved if educators could understand how best to organise the
learning process.
This culminated in a 1971 study by James Block et al of Bloom’s
Mastery Learning:
“Mastery Learning (Bloom 1968) offers a powerful new
approach to student learning … It proposes that all or almost all
students can master what they are taught ... it suggests
procedures whereby each student’s instruction and learning can
be so managed within the context of ordinary, group-based
instruction and learning … Mastery learning enables 75 to 90
per cent of the students to learn to the same high levels as the
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Learning hierarchies
If you have ever found yourself trying to tackle a learning problem
and realising that you don’t have one or more of the basic tools for
the job, then you will appreciate the ideas of Robert Gagne. In his
book The Conditions for Learning (1977), in the tradition of Bloom
and others, he argued that there were five major categories of
learning:
z verbal information
z intellectual skills
z cognitive strategies
z motor skills
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z attitudes.
Each type of learning should take place under its own ideal
instructional conditions. However, his major contribution to our
understanding of learning was not so much the classification of
learning types, but the identification of interdependency between
different levels of learning. It was this that led to his work on learning
hierarchies.
The real significance of learning hierarchies is that they demonstrate
the basis for the sequencing of learning. The hierarchy represents
increasing levels of complexity. To facilitate the learning at each level
the teacher needs to identify what is needed before learners can tackle
that level.
To identify the prerequisites at each level requires the teacher to do a
task analysis of the section of teaching that is to take place, then to
arrange the instruction in the following order:
1 Focus learners’ attention.
2 Explain the learning objectives.
3 Ask them to recall prior learning.
4 Present a new learning stimulus.
5 Provide learning guidance.
6 Get the learners to do the learning task.
7 Give them feedback on their efforts.
8 Assess what they’ve done.
9 Find a way to make sure that they will retain that knowledge and
be able to transfer it to some new situation.
This approach is obviously well suited to the instructional
programmes in the armed services, where Gagne worked for a time. It
can also be employed in aspects of formal teaching in youth
development work. It may at times be applied to formal learning
situations. However, the principles should also be kept in mind in the
informal learning environments, as it is a systematic way of
preventing learners being asked to master something for which they
lack the underlying learning tools.
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z long-term memory.
These levels are a considerable simplification. When behaviourism
was in its heyday, the study of memory was relatively straightforward.
But it has long been realised that memory is a single word for a
number of very complex and seemingly specialised mental processes,
to judge by the range of titles of the subjects that have been
investigated and established in this area. In every one of these, the
definition of memory being used is powerfully affected by the nature
of the material being stored in the mind and by what the person
storing the material is intending to do. For example, if we are trying
to learn a sequence of technical words so that they are available to us
when we want to describe a process, it is possible to learn them as we
would learn a sequence of telephone numbers. If we want to use the
memory process to gain a deeper understanding of that process, then
we might store the words in terms of their etymological relationship
to the process. These two processes are clearly very different in some
way. This suggests that perhaps memory is not as generic a
phenomenon as we imply in the use of that word.
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Words, names
maintained by
Sensor Impression or Encoding Concepts,
Attention rehearsal
memory Sensation meaning
(working
memory)
Decoding
Forgotten Forgotten
The extent and duration of memory result from the degree and level
to which information is processed in this way. Thus, we are not
conscious of material that is not processed, and it remains in sensory
storage for only a fraction of a second. Material that is attended to
and rehearsed is held in short-term storage for several seconds; and
material that is fully encoded finds its way into long-term memory.
This is why it’s so important to discuss thoroughly the new ideas that
are being studied: this enables the learner to encode or conceptualise
them in terms she understands, and that puts them into LTM.
Encoding
Encoding of information (for example linguistic information) might
occur at a superficial level (‘lexical memory’: noting and
remembering only the pattern or structure of a word, for example); or
at a deeper level (taking into account the meaning of a word –
‘semantic memory’).
A traditional model of memory portrays the mind simply as a
catalogue or movie-like recording of sequences of experiences,
perhaps organised around stimulus/response chains. Children at
school used to be taught to learn poetry like this – perhaps as a
sequence of rhyming couplets supported by a sequence of visual
images. This can be done without paying much attention to deeper
insights into what a poem is saying. Memorising a poem by attending
to the pattern of insights around which it is structured is very
different.
Several contemporary models of long-term memory are associative,
including cognitivist ‘associationism’. This assumes that the memory
is structured in the form of patterns of propositions (structures of
ideas). If we can associate new knowledge in some way with one of
these propositions, then this enables the mind to link up the new
knowledge with related ideas: this also allows it to call up specific
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Mental organisation
Terms such as ‘node’, ‘frame’, or ‘schema’ are metaphors for the
mental organisation of knowledge (or alternatively for the
organisation of memory). Associationists argue that, because of the
way information is organised in propositional structures in the long-
term memory, visual representations of this information (for example
flowcharts, cluster plans and mind maps) are very useful aids to
memory.
Tony Buzan (1995) is the most famous proponent of mind maps. He
shows how the learner can listen to a lecture, read a book or watch a
videotape and note down key words and phrases that summarise the
points or propositions that are made by the expert. As the expert’s
argument develops, the learner can begin to draw pencilled lines
relating these key word and phrases, so that eventually a cognitive
map (or propositional structure) has been drawn of the whole session.
The map probably will need to be refined or redrawn to enhance the
clarity of the argument, but can then be stored away and used
whenever needed to stimulate memory, perhaps before another talk
that the learner listens to or a talk that she gives, or as preparation for
an interview. The method really works very effectively, and some
people still refer to mind maps that they made twenty years before.
However, you have to realise that the long-term memory does not
simply reproduce events or images as a photograph does, but instead
the mind reconstructs the propositional material, as a painter does. It
often distorts events that have happened, and it sometimes even
recalls events that have not. Providing that you are aware of this, you
can use it creatively to develop your own thinking.
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Metacognition
Cognitivists are not only interested in what we learn and how we
process information, but also how we learn about the process of
learning itself. When we become accustomed to learning new things
skilfully in a field of knowledge, then this teaches us what we should
be doing when learning more new things, so that we can speed the
learning process up. Our awareness of the precise nature of our
knowledge and ability to understand, to monitor and control our
cognitive processes is referred to as ‘metacognition’. The skills of
metacognition are usually divided into two types:
z self-assessment – which refers to our ability to remember and
understand what we know and to access that knowledge and the
skills that are part of it
z self-management – the ability to manage our own cognitive
development – to judge when we should be learning something
new, and how we should go about it. As adult learners, we
employ a range of metacognition skills.
‘Cognitive strategy’ is a label for the concept of a method of thinking
and learning. When educators teach learners how to learn (as
opposed to teaching them the content of the learning) they teach
cognitive strategies. As a facilitator you should try to enhance the
learner’s cognitive strategies (thinking skills) because learners with
good cognitive strategies (metacognitive skills) are better able to
monitor and direct their own learning processes: the self-management
of their own learning. In the developed world, many jobs require the
job-holders to retrain frequently. For them, possessing good
metacognitive skills is essential. In the developing world, good
metacognitive skills will facilitate the modernisation process.
The term ‘learning/thinking strategy’ emphasises that identifiable
and teachable strategies are involved in thinking as well as in
learning. Weinstein and Mayer (1986) describe eight classes of
learning/thinking strategies. These can all be developed and taught by
you as facilitator, so that your learners can acquire them to control
their learning and develop themselves.
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Forgetting
In contemporary information-processing models of memory,
forgetting is felt to mean simply ‘failure to retrieve’, the notion being
that the memory is still somewhere in the brain, but has become
inaccessible. The assumption is that the organisation of part of the
LTM has been disrupted, and that access to memories has been
compromised by disturbances to the underlying structure of the
representations: in cognitivist terms, disturbances in the
‘propositional structures’. Theories of forgetting maintain that
information is forgotten if it is unused, distorted, suppressed, or
interfered with, or because the individual has not developed an
effective retrieval system as part of her metacognitive training.
Theories of forgetting suggest that to minimise interference with
accurate encoding and to maximise transfer, educators should
emphasise:
z distinct and important aspects of situations
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Humanistic
Everything we have looked at so far is centred on the cognitive
processes that enable us to learn, but it will be obvious to you, when
you consider it, that your feelings and self awareness are extremely
important in determining your ability to utilise your cognitive
processes. If for any reason you do not feel relaxed and confident
enough, then it becomes a real struggle to get your cognitive processes
in full flow. Your mental balance is powerfully influenced by the
feelings you have about yourself and the quality of your social
relationships. This is especially true for young people like your clients,
whose confidence may have been damaged by previous social failures
and by unemployment.
One of the major domains of social psychology is called ‘social
influence theory’, in which a series of social experiments, such as the
Stanley Milgram experiments in obedience and the Philip Zimbardo
role-play experiment in simulated prison conditions (1971), have
shown how the social roles we play powerfully influence our
behaviour and self expectations, in the short term at least, and often
our long-term development. There is a clear link between this and the
findings of labelling theory, where the labels that people assign to
themselves or have assigned to them, providing they are reinforced on
a random and repeated basis, tend to stick and partly determine their
behaviour. In this way, many people can be labelled and can role-play
themselves into incompetence (‘learned helplessness’) and failure.
Equally however, the same mechanisms can be reversed and they can
role-play themselves into intelligent and effective behaviour and
therefore into long-term intelligence and social effectiveness. This
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help them step by step to attain goals near to them and then to extend
their reach. You should also use learning situations that give them
experience of role playing competent performance. The later units in
this module spell out the methods for achieving this.
The humanistic models of learning have various perspectives but are
all concerned with the uniqueness, the individuality and dignity of
each learner and the right to self-determination. Humanistic theories
emphasise:
z the inborn and powerful human desire to learn
z the importance of the educator’s concern for the perceptions,
needs and feelings of the learner
z the desirability of self-determination: the need for the learner to
have a strong measure of control over the learning process
z the need for the teacher to be a facilitator, rather than an
‘authority’.
Although both humanistic and behaviouristic theories emphasise the
belief in people’s ability to learn and develop, many aspects of their
approaches are in ideological conflict. While the behaviourist
emphasis is on ‘outcomes’ and ‘performance’, the humanistic
emphasis is on the development of the social and emotional self,
which is seen as the key supporting framework for underlying
competence.
Three of the major early influences were the work of Carl Rogers,
John Holt and Paulo Freire. In later modules you will encounter the
‘conscientisation’ model of youth development work pioneered by the
Brazilian educationalist, Freire; this has considerable overlap with
other humanistic models but also has a radical political dimension,
influenced by the work of Karl Marx.
Motivation
Theories about motivation talk about two kinds:
z extrinsic or external, for example praise from a parent, teacher or
mentor (or the risk of disapproval if a goal is not achieved)
z intrinsic or internal – the human urge to grow, excel, to fulfil
one’s potential or to self-actualise.
Humanists are interested in developing a person’s awareness of
intrinsic motivators, such as feeling competent, creative and
empowered. This is in contrast with the behaviourist emphasis on
extrinsic motivators, such as those relating to rewards and
punishments.
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the child who gave the most trouble and was often the least obviously
likeable was usually the one that needed love the most. In her
remarkably powerful and effective teaching she transformed such
children by giving them attention and respect, and really ‘listening’ to
them. One of your major tasks in leading a group will be to create an
atmosphere where people listen to each other and ‘hear’ each other,
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where respect and consideration are the basic affective scaffolding for
learning.
You can create this in the group by practising it yourself. In this
environment, self-esteem and self-belief will flourish. Of course, the
patterns for achieving this will vary from culture to culture.
Sometimes, the highest respect is given to people with high social
status, and you will of course have to act within the norms of your
culture, but always with the underlying aim of promoting self-esteem
and group solidarity.
Maslow’s model says that these first-level needs have to be met before
progression to the learning needs of which education is most aware –
the cognitive and aesthetic needs, the ‘meta’ needs. The highest need
in Maslow’s system is that of self-actualisation – the unfolding and
fulfilment of the self or reaching one’s higher potential. This shows
itself in spurts of growth, where the cognitive and affective schemata
become clearly richer and more effective.
Self-actualisation
(G
DS
RO
EE
WT
Aesthetic
-N
goodness,beauty
H
TA
truth, justice
NE
ME
Cognitive ED
knowledge, symmetry S)
Self-esteem
competence, approval, recognition
(D
EF
S
IC
IE
NC
SIC
Y
BA
NE
Safety
ED
Physiological
food, drink
Maslow’s basic needs are also called ‘deficiency needs’ because they
become motivators when a person has a deficiency with respect to a
need: for example, a lack of food or water will motivate the activity to
look for these things.
The great Russian educator Anton Makerenko, was given the task of
gathering up the bands of homeless, penniless, wild young people
wandering through post-revolutionary Russia (described in his novel
The Road to Life – an Epic of Education, 1955). The model he
developed in his remarkably successful programme was based on the
group having goals. He describes how the crucial point was
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establishing motivation, and the first motivation was for his hungry
band to find food and make a meal, satisfying the most basic need of
all. He used that goal to establish the next highest motive of creating
and collectively rebuilding a barn into a hostel, which developed the
group’s sense of solidarity and their need for each other. He converted
the achievement of these goals into establishing a new and higher
level of meta needs, the goal of eventually writing and performing
plays for the local peasants so that the young people might become
loved and respected by society. The goal of performing the play was
the establishing of a meta need. Meta needs are also called ‘growth
needs’: they motivate, not because of fulfilling a deficiency, but
because of our need to grow and to be self-fulfilled.
References
Ausubel, D. (1963) The Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Learning,
Grune and Stratton (New York)
Berne, E. (1996) Games People Play, Ballantine Books
Baron, Robert A. (1997) Psychology, Allyn and Bacon
Block, J. H. (ed.) (1971) Mastery Learning: Theory and Practice, Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, London
Bloom, B. (ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Longman
London
Boulton-Lewis, G. (1997) ‘Information processing, memory, age and
adult learning’ in P. Sutherland (ed.) Adult Learning: a reader, Kogan
Page, London
Buzan, T. (1995) The Mind Map Book, BBC Books, London
Gagne, R. M. (1977) The Conditions of Learning, Rinehart and
Winston, New York
Gleitman, H., Friedlund, A .J and Reisberg, D. (2003) Psychology, W.
W. Norton, New York
Weinstein, C. E. and Mayer, R. E. (1986) ‘The teaching of learning
strategies.’ in M. Wittrock (ed.) Handbook of Research on Teaching, (pp.
315–327) Macmillan, New York
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z cognitive
z affective, and
z psychomotor.
Learning as a form of change of behaviour can take place in all of
these three domains.
Though they usually occur together, the emphasis is usually on one at
any one time.
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Social skills
However, the affective domain means much more than this. Think of
the importance of emotions in relation to your social skills with
friends and acquaintances and family. If you lack skill in the affective
domain (or emotional intelligence) your relationships will probably
break down with perhaps devastating consequences. Young people
who have gaps in their emotional intelligence, may need help from
the youth worker to fill those gaps, or in other words to get rid of
those emotional blocks to new affective learning.
The affective domain is the domain where the automatic systems are
most powerfully at work and this makes it hard to teach emotional
intelligence unless you tap directly into its deep structure and make it
accessible to analysis. This is of course the domain of the
psychotherapist and psychoanalyst when emotional intelligence has
become badly damaged and blocked.
For youth development workers it is important to recognise when
emotional damage is so bad that they should refer their client to
specialised help.
Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers, a US psychiatrist and humanistic psychologist,
discovered from his psychotherapy experience that when certain
conditions are present in the counsellor/client relationship, even quite
bad cases of damaged emotional intelligence improve enormously.
These conditions are:
z that the counsellor has an unconditional positive acceptance and
respect for the client as a person, no matter what the client has
done, even though the counsellor may deeply disapprove of what
has been done
z that the counsellor is always authentic and not playing a role or
game with the client
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z that the counsellor is always honest about her or his feelings and
accepts the feelings of the client
z that the counsellor does not put words into the mouth of the
client but listens very carefully and reflects back to the client what
she thinks the client has said in order to check out the client’s
feelings.
What is very interesting is that when these methods were applied in
education they had a very dramatic positive effect on pupils’ attitudes,
self-concepts and learning achievements. Now this was tested in
various countries, always with similar results, so it may well be of
universal relevance.
We can develop emotional intelligence through taking these
conditions as a model and thus touching the deep structure of young
people’s emotional intelligence, without them necessarily realising
what is going on. When we have an open conflict with a young
person that is a good opportunity to explore feelings openly,
providing we don’t get ourselves emotionally upset. By the sort of
insight and acceptance Rogers talks about we can have a huge effect.
Case studies and role play are useful methods for developing
emotional insight. Helping youths to deal with problems of family,
community, authorities and so on should be at least partly directed at
emotional blocks and gaps.
If you are interested in this issue of emotional intelligence and
emotional learning I recommend you to read Daniel Goleman,
Emotional Intelligence (Bloomsbury, London, 1996, ISBN 0–745–
2830–6). It’s meant for the general reader and is very approachable.
Karen F. Stone and Harold Q. Dillehunt (Goleman, 1996) have
suggested the following list of areas of emotional skill and
intelligence, which they teach as the Self Science Curriculum:
z self-awareness
z personal decision-making
z managing feelings
z handling stress
z empathy
z effective communications
z self-disclosure
z insight into your own emotions
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z self-acceptance
z taking personal responsibility
z assertiveness
z working effectively in groups
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z conflict resolution.
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By Glen Custred.
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another feature of oral tradition that may alter or distort the memory
of past events. This process was explored in detail by earlier scholars.
The way new elements are borrowed and absorbed depends on the
influence of the source tradition, on the interests of the borrowers,
and on the part the borrowed elements play in the pre-existing
tradition. For example, an image expressed in a motif may reinforce a
theme in the borrowing culture, thus making it more concrete. Or an
innovation may fill out an earlier traditional account, as in the case
Vansina relates of the Kuba, who say their ancestors came to their
present homeland by river. When traders, whom they encountered
from the eighteenth century on, told them about the marvels of the
sea, ‘it fleshed out the image of their points of origin’ and was thus
incorporated into their body of oral traditions.
Fusion of different elements into a single unit is another shaping
process in oral tradition whereby multiple historical figures may be
fused into a single hero, several battles fused into one battle, historic
events fused with mythic themes. Omission, borrowing, and fusion
regularly occur in oral tradition and can be taken into account if the
researcher understands the cultural and historical context of
transmission. Researchers can discard elements that do not reflect
historical fact and earmark elements of questionable historical
accuracy. Final validation, however, requires corroborating external
evidence like written documents and archaeological and other kinds
of data.
Oral traditions can actually be more credible than written accounts
when contradictions occur in written records. Vansina cites as an
example the Abenaki in Maine, whose oral traditions tell about events
in 1759 during the French and Indian War. When their oral history
was written down over a hundred years later and compared with
French and English written versions of the same event, the oral
tradition not only confirmed both written versions, it also resolved a
contradiction between them.
But we can’t expect to find the same degree of validity in myths as in
legends, since the function of mythic lore is very different from that
of other kinds of oral traditions.
Archaic myth, as it is sometimes called, is the living myth of oral
societies such as those found in America at the time of European
contact. This kind of myth deals not with historic time but with the
distant past. It addresses the questions of how things became
accomplished, how they came to be. Mythic narratives frequently
include bizarre elements – monsters, figures that are both animal and
human at the same time, shape-shifters, magical transformations, and
incestuous relationships. Nonetheless, they are believed to be true
accounts by those who relate them, ‘a reality of a wholly different
order from nature,’ as Mircea Elide puts it. Myth often has a moral
dimension; it explains in moral terms why things happened, how the
landscape was configured, why plants and animals are the way they
are. The significance of myth lies in the cultural and psychological
realm, not in historical fact.
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Since myths, like all folk narratives, reflect the experiences and
societies of those who tell them, such great events as migrations and
invasions may be telescoped in time in the shift from the historic to
the mythic past. Borrowing may occur when ideas spread from one
religion to another, filling in or reinforcing earlier narratives or
introducing new elements into the mythic narrative. The most striking
change comes about when a myth is created to reinforce a new
religious movement. The Ghost Dance is an example of a
revitalization movement that originated in one North American tribe
and spread in various forms to other tribes. Although the roots of a
myth may lie in the distant past, some of its elements may be of more
recent origin.
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________________________________________
How to contact the author of this article:
Glynn Custred
Department of Anthropology
California State University
Hayward, CA 94542–3039
e-mail: [email protected]
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Personality types
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of several inventories
that are used to identify and describe an individual’s personality type.
Psychologists use it to create a psychological or personality profile
based on Carl Jung’s typology of conscious functioning (archetypes).
Jung constructed three measures for evaluating personality types, to
which Myers and Briggs added a fourth:
z introversion – extroversion
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z thinking – feeling
z intuition – sensing
z judging – perceiving.
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Brain dominance
The brain dominance theory examines learning style in terms of
which side of the brain a person tends to use most for processing
information. Brain scanning research shows that people use different
sides of their brains to process different kinds of information and this
tends to cause different patterns of brain dominance.
All people use both sides of their brains holistically, but most
individuals tend to prefer learning strategies associated with one side
or the other. Such individuals are considered to be left-brain dominant
or right-brain dominant. Some have about even preferences and are
considered to have ‘bilateral dominance’.
The left side of the brain:
z processes verbal, abstract, analytical information in a linear,
sequential manner,
z looks at differences and contrasts in information, noting the small
signs that represent the whole pattern,
z concerns itself with reasoning abilities embodied in as maths and
language.
The right side of the brain:
z processes non-verbal, concrete, and spatial information,
z looks at similarities in patterns, forming a whole picture of any
information, and processing parts in relationship to the whole,
z concerns itself with artistic abilities such as music and graphics.
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Auditory
Thirty percent of people are auditory learners, who learn by listening.
They tend to:
z learn from verbal instruction
z enjoy plays
z write with light pressure and not always legibly
z talk while they write
z remember names and forget faces
z be distracted by noise
z remember by listening, especially when there is music
z find games and pictures annoying and distracting.
Visual
Forty percent are visual learners, who learn by seeing and writing.
They tend to:
z be verbal (see words) or pictorial (see pictures)
z remember faces but not names
z have vivid imaginations
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z think in pictures
z show their emotions
z use colour.
Kinaesthetic
Kinaesthetic learners use their whole bodies to learn. They tend to:
z learn by doing
z not be avid readers
z be poor spellers
z remember what was done, not seen or talked about
z not hear as well as others
z use touch
z attack things physically
z be impulsive
z enjoy games.
Note: All children are very kinaesthetic to age six.
Common correlations
Here are some of the correlations that may occur to produce the four
main, very different, overall learning styles:
z relational
z analytical
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z structured
z energetic.
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z Good planning
z Thorough and painstaking
z Systematic and careful.
Potential pitfalls:
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1 Intelligence testing
There is an enormous range of variation in the observed skilfulness
and capability of human beings. The desire to find the underlying
causes of this is deep-seated in anyone who manages other human
beings – teachers, government ministers, the heads of enterprises.
Because if we can pinpoint the causes, it is assumed that we can
deploy our human resources more efficiently, either by (a) tracking
people into career paths suitable for their human potential (such as
giving them only basic education if they don’t have high intellectual
potential), or (b) giving them appropriate training to enhance their
underlying potential (such as special remedial and developmental
training).
The history of intelligence testing and related subjects like neuro-
imaging and neuro-endocrinology is part of the history of the attempt
to do this. An example of this is The Female Brain by Louann
Brizendine (2006). Brizendine’s aims are praiseworthy:
“I believe that women actually perceive the world differently
from men. If women attend to those differences they can make
better decisions about how to manage their lives.”
But the difficulties involved in interpreting the evidence of test
performance and even the best images of the human brain are such
that we need to be extremely careful about the generalisations that we
make. Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist and author of Y: The
Descent of Man (2003) has pointed out that there is absolutely no
consensus about the science of these differences. He makes this point:
“That doesn’t mean that there are no differences between the
brains of the sexes, but we should take care not to exaggerate
them.”
This sort of approach has been aimed at finding genetic differences in
potential intelligence between different ethnic groups and different
social castes and classes. We should be extremely wary of all of this if
only because those who design the tests are likely already to be
among the elite groups and they naturally design tests based on their
own mental habits. Nevertheless, if we can find anything that will
help young people’s development from this material, we should use it.
What is crucial is that we should not use anything which says that the
limits of their development are known. Tony Buzan (1995) has
described the unlimited potential of all human brains. It’s that we
should focus on.
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The intelligence testing tradition is based on the idea that our ability
to deal with problems in the real world depends on underlying
general abilities in perception and reasoning, and testers have devised
sophisticated systems for showing how they believe that this can be
done. However, these intelligence tests are inevitably produced by the
preconceptions of the test designers. One of the things intelligence
test designers have omitted is testing for emotional intelligence,
though there are now sophisticated ways of doing so, because it
doesn’t fit the IQ model. You have already read about ‘emotional
intelligence’ in this module, and the identification of that as a
separable mode of processing knowledge has emerged from extensive
experience in areas such as modern management studies. In
management studies the ability to handle human interaction is
understood to depend on possessing underlying general ‘people
abilities’. It’s evident from management research that people can have
very high people intelligence and yet be relatively low achievers in
other areas in IQ testing. People abilities, or ‘people intelligence’ are
nevertheless clearly extremely important in determining one’s ability
to deal with problems in the real world.
One of the problems with traditional intelligence tests is the
assumption that there is a single, underlying universal factor, a
‘general intelligence’ that drives all of someone’s intelligent
behaviour. The psychologist Charles Spearman labelled this as g,
which stands at the top of a hierarchy of less important and more
specific factors of intelligence such as numerical ability or verbal
ability and so on. What this theory says is that you may have a high
level of skills in some of these specific factors and a low level in
others, but, by analysing your results statistically, testers can work out
just how high your general intelligence is (your IQ or Intelligence
Quotient), and this can then be compared with everybody else’s. They
claim that this measured intelligence will determine your intellectual
development for the rest of your life. Psychologists who support this
view accept that the environment has some influence on this
development (about 20 per cent). But they argue that g, the general
intelligence factor, which they say underpins and controls the level of
all the other factors, is 80 per cent determined by the genes that you
inherit from your parents.
You will probably have realised by now that the writers of this
module do not accept this traditional view of the nature of
intelligence. The reason for this is that traditional models of
intelligence, because they insist that your intelligence is determined by
your genes, are particularly negative about the possibility of raising
the level of thinking of people who do badly on traditional
intelligence tests. Perhaps the most vivid way to illustrate the inherent
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bias of such testing is to remind you that Muhammad Ali failed this
type of intelligence test badly but then went on, in the special
circumstances of the Vietnam War, to become one of the most
intelligent, admired and respected spokespeople of the twentieth
century. In fact our own experience of working with young people is
that you should not label them in any way. As Tony Buzan points out
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2 Multiple intelligences
There are theories and models of intelligence that are much closer to
the rich and complex abilities of young people than the IQ model.
Howard Gardner (1983) argues that our experience of the real world
tells us that intelligence is not unitary but multiple. Even lay people
use the unitary term, ‘common sense’ e.g. ‘I don’t like discussing
things with her, she’s got no common sense’. This lay person’s phrase
clearly suggests a unitary view of intelligence. But the commonsense
of a subsistence farmer is clearly quite different from the
commonsense of a gold miner or the common sense of a computer
programmer. The differences in each situation require very different
spectra of abilities. When we develop the capacities of young people
through project work, we need to be able to analyse how well they
adapt their thinking and behaviour to the tasks that face them in order
to know how to help them. A unitary view of intelligence is not
helpful for that, whereas a multiple intelligences model is.
Intelligence is the mental process by which we understand the
situation we are in and deal with it. Gardner argues that:
z research shows that each of us has available for use seven (or
more) quite different kinds of intelligence (as we use each one its
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What Guilford means by this is that his testing found that very large
numbers of individuals could be extremely high performers on some
ability recognised by IQ theorists as showing the ability to ‘educe
correlates and correlations’ (as required by Charles Spearman), but
showed extremely low ability on the other abilities recognised as
relevant by IQ theorists.
The Structure of Intellect Theory of Intelligence (SI Theory) is a
multi-factor theory of intelligence developed by Professor J. P.
Guilford (The Nature of Human Intelligence, 1967). This is of
considerably older origin than Gardner’s theory. Guilford’s model
was not based on subjective notions in any form, but on intellectual
categories derived from systematic and sustained testing of Second
World War recruits in order to give them the most appropriate rapid
training for combat in the European and Pacific wars. Guilford
researched and developed a wide variety of intelligence tests, very
much in the way that the IQ testers had done, but he came up with
very different conclusions from them, because he had to achieve
extremely accurate, valid and reliable results, results that might
determine the lives of fighting men and women and the outcome of a
world war. Instead of finding one general underlying, determining
intelligence factor, his SI model found 120 separate general factors.
Though it was a model devised originally to solve the problems faced
in personnel allocation and training during the Second World War, it
is today widely used in education and in personnel selection and
placement. It is used widely because it enables learning facilitators to
analyse what the intellectual abilities essential to a piece of teaching
are, and appropriate preparation can be made to ensure that the
learners are able to access these before teaching. It is also used
because it is an excellent diagnostic tool for specifying what aspect of
thinking is blocking the learner’s thought processes and showing how
that can be overcome. It seems to me a very much stronger and more
coherent model than any that I have seen from the rest of the
intelligence testing community.
Guilford’s view, as appeared in New Education (September 1965),
was:
“The multi-factor view, which seems to be making substantial
headway at present, assumes that, on the contrary, there are
numerous unique intellectual abilities (but not an enormously
large number) that collectively can be regarded as composing
intelligence…..and with respect to the nature-nurture issue,
there are, moreover, some indications that learning may well
make substantial contributions to those abilities.”
Today, the model describes 150 separate factors of intelligence,
developed out of the original 120 factors as a result of repeated
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testing over a long period of time: the extra 30 factors are more finely
related to the actual performances on the tests. When Guilford had
first got to the point of creating a theory to describe what he had
discovered in his military testing, he developed the tentative SI model
and tested the model using a wide range of psychometric tests. These
gave him operational definitions of the various abilities proposed by
the theory, and he used factor analysis to decide which tests seemed
to measure which abilities. When he had found a battery of tests that
factor analysis indicated were valid measures of each ability, he was
able to refine them and check their reliability.
Each of these 150 factors can be separate enough to block your
thinking if it is a crucial step in a learning process and you haven’t
developed it properly. For example, if you have a weakness in one of
these units, visually recognising quite basic behavioural information
such as the way someone smiles (as a researcher I know with
Asperger’s syndrome does), then that means your evaluation of their
interpersonal behaviour is blocked and may cause serious problems
with behavioural or people relationships. On the other hand you may
have a particular strength in several others of these factors, which you
can use to help solve that problem. An actual example I have used is
to exploit the fact that the person with the Asperger’s problem was
very highly developed in qualitative social research techniques
(conversation analysis and so on). When this process of him
interacting with research subjects in one to one conversations was
filmed, the facial expressions of the interviewees could be correlated
with the conversation, and slowly the investigator built up some skills
in recognising what visual expressions mean. This is one of the
reasons why the model is used so widely in education, because it
enables learners’ information processing weaknesses to be identified
and remedied.
For simplification purposes, Guilford structured his findings in the
form of a cube.
Contents
Visual
Auditory
Symbolic
Semantic
Behavioural
Products
Units
Classes
Relations
Systems
Transformation
Implications
Operations
Evaluation
Convergent production
Divergent production
Memory
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References
Guilford, J. P. (1967) The Nature of Human Intelligence, McGraw-Hill
(New York)
Richardson, K. (2000) The Making of Intelligence, Columbia University
Press
Smith, M. K. (2002) ‘Howard Gardner and Multiple Intelligences’ in
The Encyclopedia of Informal Education, available from
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm.
White, J. (1998) Do Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences add up?
Institute of Education, University of London
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References
Harris, S. (1980) Culture and Learning: Tradition and Education in North
East Arnhem Land, Department of Education, Darwin
Jordan, C., Hu-Pei Au, K. and Joesting A. K (1981) ‘Patterns of
Classroom Interaction with Pacific Islands Children: The Importance
of Cultural Differences’. Paper prepared for the National Centre for
Bilingual Research, Los Alamitos, California, September 1981.
Sponsored by the National Institute of Education (Washington, DC)
Lesa, R. F. (1995) Learning Styles of Samoan Students, University
Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ninnes, P. M. (1991) Culture and Learning in Western Province, Solomon
Islands, unpublished MA thesis, Flinders University, South Australia
Ritchie, J. and Ritchie, J. (1979) Growing Up in Polynesia, Allen and
Unwin, Auckland
Thaman, K. H. (1998) Ako and Faiako: cultural values, educational ideas
and teacher role perceptions in Tonga, Ph D thesis, University of the
South Pacific, Suva
Thomas, David. R. (1978) ‘Cooperation and competition among
children in the Pacific Islands and New Zealand; the school as an
agent of social changes’ in Journal of Research and Development in
Education
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(Adapted 2007 by Lewis Owen, from the first Draft Commonwealth Diploma in
Youth in Development Work Tutor’s Manual.)
Reflective practice
The concept of reflective practice is important to the work of the
Diploma. We tend to favour Paolo Freire’s version of this, as
suggested in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972). Freire was very
influenced by the humanistic aspects of Marxist theory. Marxism sees
human beings as agents who continually construct the world anew
around what they find there and around their understanding of what
is possible. In doing so, they at the same time construct themselves
and their abilities anew. To do this they have to be organised into a
social structure, and that structure is sometimes hostile to the changes
that people would like, so conflict arises between those social classes
that are moving forward and those that are controlling the present
system for their own benefit. Marx saw no real limits to human
development other than the potential of the material world’s
resources. But he did see how powerfully reactionary social classes
controlled the ideas and actions of the progressive classes.
Freire’s mode of development of literacy among poor peasant
communities was through the world of action (or practice). His
peasants learned to read and write because reading and writing were
essential tools that allowed them to understand what actions to take
in order to change their oppressive conditions. Freire’s method was to
get his subjects to ‘name the world’ as the first step, because, he
argued, once you name something and understand what you mean by
the name, you then have some power to change it.
The method of assigning names is quite important, because the
names need to be both precise in meaning and yet open to the
meaning being changed: this change is caused by the way that our
understanding of the ideas is affected by our actions. He made use of
important named ideas that he called ‘generative themes’. He had
identified these ideas as the key themes for understanding what was
causing the poor peasants to be oppressed and how to reverse this.
Such themes might be, for example, around the price paid to small
farmers for their coffee by middlemen.
He began by making a representation of such issues in the real world
in some concrete form, such as a picture or drawing, or an actual bag
of coffee beans. Words were then attached to these representations as
labels. He established with them that these written forms were based
on basic elements of meaning that could be broken down and
recombined in different ways to produce different meanings. By doing
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A cognitive apprenticeship
When you acquire any kind of knowledge, the nature of what you
have acquired is deeply influenced by the culture of the situation in
which you acquired it. The way the thirteen modules have been
designed is such that you will be expected to become quasi-
practitioners of the various disciplines in the Diploma course. And
that involves quite a penetrating grasp of the principles of the content
outlined in the modules, if you are going to apply these in facilitating
the development of young people. However, it doesn’t in any sense
require that you get a thorough knowledge of the scope and detailed
methods of the disciplines concerned.
To achieve the Cognitive Outcomes of the module on
Commonwealth Values, you do not require a course in political
philosophy, but you do require a basic grasp of the sort of questions
political philosophers ask, and the ways in which political
philosophers tend to construct explanations of how to analyse and
tackle political problems in the real world.
What we are asking is that the subject matter of the various modules
be treated not as ‘bodies of knowledge’ but as ‘practices’. We are
hoping to facilitate for course members the practices of the
sociological thinker, the planner and the environmental activist in
order to extend your competence as developers of the skills of youth
development. Of course, that involves acquiring some of the content
in those fields, but only enough to facilitate the growth of the
practical skills and modes of thinking involved. We can probably
agree that all forms of inquiry begin with the basic questions typical
of the specific area of knowledge being employed: sociologists ask
certain types of questions about issues in the social world,
psychologists other questions, planners different questions. These
come from the typical ‘angle of approach’ taken by the various types
of practitioners.
These questions relate of course to theories of various kinds typical
of the particular disciplines concerned; important as these theories
are, however, they should be viewed as part of the practices of the
various disciplines, rather than ends in themselves. Because the
theories are the most obvious part of these disciplines, it is tempting
for you to put your main effort into studying the theory as an end in
itself. Theoretical knowledge is of course a profoundly important part
of competence, but the key issue is the role that knowledge plays in
the ‘practice’ of the subject. If it does not influence the way you
actually see the deep level issues in the problem that confronts you,
nor helps you to focus on the steps necessary for successful action,
then it is what A. N. Whitehead in The Aims of Education (1929)
called ‘inert’ knowledge – knowledge that you have put away in your
knowledge bank.
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implications for the work of the Diploma suggested by this are that,
though there is a lot of what will to most course participants be new
knowledge, the teaching of that material should generally be based on
helping you to reorganise what you already know, in the light of new
insights.
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References
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin
Whitehead A. N. (1929 ) The Aims of Education and other essays,
Macmillan, New York
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Free-group discussions
Free-group discussions will solve some of the above problems. With
this method, the trainer is no longer the sole source of information.
Peers become a potent source of learning.
The group must have a constant flow of new ideas and information to
make such discussions a worth while experience. Text books, stories,
poems, dramas, audio visual material, photographs etc., can be used
to facilitate free group discussions. Read the following example:
“The Humanities Curriculum Project of The Schools Council
and The Nuffield Foundation (Heineman, 1970) developed a
battery of evidence (films, tapes, photographs) to supplement
the teacher. According to the findings of this project, the only
tenable position for a teacher to adopt was a value-neutral
position. The value neutral teacher participates in group
discussion, but, being aware of the limitations of her/his
participation, will not take sides in it.”
(From J. Rogers (1982) Adults Learning)
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Work place situations make use of the skills analysis method both
formally and informally. The facilitator has a central role to play in
relation to skills analysis method.
Problem-solving
Learners are asked to solve everyday problems in small peer groups or
individually. As they are actively engaged in the problem-solving
process, there is no need for them to make special efforts to memorise
concepts or principles. The knowledge and skills acquired by solving
problems should have a direct relevance to their everyday lives.
Learners should follow a systematic process which involves five
important stages to find a solution to a problem:
1 Identify the problem.
2 Formulate objectives.
3 Prepare data-collecting instruments.
4 Collect and analyse data.
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Formulate objectives
Objectives should be clearly defined either by the facilitator, or by
learners under the guidance of the facilitator. They will provide a
clear direction to learners to identify possible solutions.
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Projects
“Project work usually involves groups leaving the cocoon of the
classroom and venturing out to seek raw materials from local
people, records or conditions... The result of the project, its end
product, has often been in a form which involved offering
something to the community.”
Rogers J. (1982:188)
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Case studies
Case studies represent real life situations that can be used for
discussion, problem-solving, or simply to illustrate concepts that are
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