Compare and Contrast The Learning Process - Case Study Example

Order 428396 Topic: Compare and Contrast The Learning Process Introduction: Globalization of economy, industrial and internet revolutions have created an avalanche of learning processes. Connecting with information is not only a necessity but it has proved to be an urgent issue. Business and industrial organizations depend upon updating and imparting the latest learning processes to their workforce, at all levels. The situation demands that, more than one learning styles are adopted. The selection of the learning style is important to accelerate the process of learning. An individual tends to pick up new things better if presented in a style that works for him. Learning has turned out to be a life-long process and the dividing line between youth learning and learning in adulthood is fast vanishing. Merriam quotes Geissler (1996,pp.35-36), “Youth in fact, who are sent out into life with a dwindling sackful of values,....face a situation in which they have to keep filling up their sack. This leads adult education to take lifelong learning as its motto. The duty to be free(with the pressure to realize oneself)is the duty to go on learning.....The hole in the ozone layer provides the stimulus for courses to which people turn for advice, mad cow disease pushes up the numbers attending vegetarian cooking courses, and backache creates a need for posture classes(p.6) By the time a student graduates from the traditional college education and enters the competitive job market, or if he is an entrepreneur thinks of establishing ones own production unit, technology has moved faster than what is taught in the syllabus and merits of ones degree certificate. The process of learning has become continuous from the point of launching ones career to eventual retirement. Merriam writes, “...technology has had an enormous impact on the economy. Robotics and automation displace production workers but create other jobs; technology has fostered whole new work structures such as telecommuting; and so on. The effect of the global economy and technological advances on the nature of adult learning is staggering. Adults find that they must continue their learning past formal schooling in order to function at work, at home, and in their communities. The need for new knowledge for updating old information, for retraining, has resulted in multi-billion dollar educational enterprise.”(p.2) Before comparing and and contrasting the learning processes through adult development and learning models, it needs to be clearly understood that most of the theories are inclusive and they have something to give and something to take from each other; they are inclusive and not exclusive. Their implications for practice depends upon the prevailing conditions. In the present times, when the society is deeply impacted by materialistic civilization and technological advancement on a unprecedented scale, to concretely define adult development is an impossibility. Theories are important, they are the launching pads for practical understanding of the concept of adult education, but each theory has its own limitation. Lisa M.Baumgarter quotes Clark and Caffarella (1999), "Theories [serve] as a lens through which we view the life course; that lens illuminates certain elements and tells a particular story about adult life" (p. 3). Four lenses through which adult development mostly observed are behavioral / mechanistic, cognitive / psychological, contextual / sociocultural, and integrative. Before the advent of industrialization and internet revolution, if one speaks of adult education as a discretely separate domain, the statement could have been accepted, but not any more. In the present context, learning in childhood and adolescence are alternative beats of the same heart. Nevertheless some essential differences are there between the two types of learning. Four major research areas, self-directed learning, critical reflection, experiential learning and learning to learn represent unique and exclusive adult learning processes. Variables of culture, personality, political ethos and ethnicity impact each of the above learning processes. Chronological age is also an important factor. Many researchers have made significant contribution to more than one area of research. Self-Directed Learning: Let us understand this process by a metaphor. It is like one studies in the College of Self-education, where ones mind is ones Principal; ones initiatives, the Professors; ones hard work, the Tutors. Such an individual decides to learn out of compulsions of the job or intense craving to acquire new knowledge and by setting ones own goals. In the context of globalization, self-directed learning is widespread and popular. It is also economical from the point of view of cost-factor. But some argue that self-direction must be seen as firmly in the tradition of emancipatory adult education. This observation is debatable.The concept of self-direction for adult learning, needs to be properly understood. Cross-cultural dimension is an important factor in this area. The ideal of the independent, self-directed learner has some sympathizers, but many critics. The critics aver that it reflects patriarchal values of division, separation and competition. But this is a contentious issue. The backgrounder information that affects the decision to learn in this manner is important. The issues that merit consideration are adults past experiences, the type of the learning task, and the intended domain. Political ethos of the time also affect the decision to learn as per this procedure. The tools used by such adult learners are social networks, peer support groups and educational guidance as well as emotional sustenance. Ignore the cultural formation of the self, then self-direction is equated with separateness and selfishness, the sole purpose being to pursue the private ends not taking into consideration the consequences of such an option for others and wider cultural pursuits. Individual projects do not go in harmony with cooperative and collective impulses. Such adults citing self-direction, deny importance of collective action, and work focused on self and perhaps selfish aggrandizement. Critical Reflection Developing critical reflection is the outcome of the intense craze of adult educators to own a process which can distinctively be claimed as adult. Evidence that adults are capable of this kind of learning can be found in developmental psychology, where a host of constructs such as embedded logic, dialectical thinking, working intelligence, reflective judgment, post-formal reasoning and epistemic cognition describe how adults come to think contextually and critically (Brookfield, 1987, 1991).Critical reflection concentrates on three mutually inclusive processes. “ (1) the process by which adults question and then replace or re-frame an assumption that up to that point has been uncritically accepted as representing commonsense wisdom, (2) the process through which adults take alternative perspective on previously taken for granted ideas, actions, forms of reasoning and ideologies, and (3) the process by which adults come to recognize the hegemonic aspects of dominant cultural values and to understand how self-evident renderings of the natural state of the world actually bolster the power and self-interest of unrepresentative minorities.” (Adult Learning...) Other factors taken into account by the writers in this segment are the political edge, non-political domains of adult life like workplace actions and personal relationships. However, psychoanalytic and critical social theoretical traditions do not work in tandem always as observed from many studies of critical reflection. Let us examine the example given by Mezirow(1991) relating to women returning to higher education. He sees unassailable connection and transformation through this learning process through which adults succeeded in recognizing and re-framing their culturally induced dependency relationships and roles. He has drawn strongly on the work of Jurgen Habermas to propose a theory of trans formative learning "that can explain how adult learners make sense or meaning of their experiences, the nature of the structures that influence the way they construe experience, the dynamics involved in modifying meanings, and the way the structures of meaning themselves undergo changes when learners find them to be dysfunctional" (Mezirow, 1991, p. xii).Results have been successful in varying groups of economically weaker sections of adult learners like male spouse abusers, displaced homemakers and those having problems of health. Researchers of critical reflection as a dimension of adult learning have many unfinished tasks. To explain this theory, psychoanalytic and critical theory terminology currently employed, is beyond the understanding of the common learner and as such a more accessible language needs to be found. The current research in this area confirms that critical reflection is context or domain-specific. Experiential Learning The emphasis on experience as a defining feature of adult learning is expressed in Lindemans frequently quoted aphorism that "experience is the adult learners living textbook" (1926, p. 7) and that adult education was, therefore, "a continuing process of evaluating experiences" (p. 85).What is theory after-all? It is other mans experience. The concept of andragogy is based on this premises. This concept is widely accepted as the adult eduction practice in many societies like United States, France, Poland, Hungary, Britain, Poland, Estonia, Russia, Finland and Yugoslavia. Its wide acceptance can be concluded as its intrinsic merit. It appeals to ones emotions and can be accepted as per the ground realities in the area of adult education. Adult teaching must relate to the experience of the adult. Notwithstanding ideological differences, this theory finds acceptance with all. Models of experiential adult learning practices find wide acceptance. They highlight the importance of simulations, case studies, games etc. and many universities take pride in the experiential methods adopted by them as part of their syllabus. The importance of gradual accumulation of experience as one progresses in life, is the main difference between learning in adulthood and the formal school/college education at the young age. Yet total reliance on accumulated experience has problems. It has certain blemishes. Experience is not an objectively neutral phenomenon, that is to say your experience and my experience about the implications of a particular incident may vary substantially. Thoughts, perceptions and sensations vary from individual to individual. Culture is the dominant influencing factor. The moral, cultural and ideological considerations matter much about the opinions formed. Experience plays the role as demanded by an individual, in the light of ones experience. Prejudices and pre-constructed notions can not be ruled out. The second issue is the duration of the experience. Duration doesnt carry weight as such. How long one has been involved in the process of learning is not important; how one is involved, is indeed important. If one uncritically accepts the assimilated culture filters, doesnt critically examine them, such an approach has no meaning as for the duration of the experience. Experience minus critical insight is like the stagnant pool of water. It will not lead to favorable or beneficial results. Experiences should not be permanently coated with the lacquer of fixed opinions. History of people, story and experiences told with a ideological perspective, are the danger-points. Experience, may sometimes, create heroes out of zeros. Due to fixed opinions one may see the merit in a story/incident, which is reality is not there. Learning to Learn In this learning process importance is attached for the ability of adults how to learn. --their response to the different situations through the range of different styles. With no fixed and agreeable definition this process suffers, and turns out to be an umbrella term to describe the process. Adults develop the learning styles as per the demands of the situation. Some “ authors emphasize that learning how to learn involves an epistemological awareness deeper than simply knowing how one scores on a cognitive style inventory, or what is ones typical or preferred pattern of learning. Rather, it means that adults possess a self-conscious awareness of how it is they come to know what they know; an awareness of the reasoning, assumptions, evidence and justifications that underlie our beliefs that something is true.”(Adult Learning:) The outcome of studies conducted with a number of adult groups and different range of settings like the workplace, adult basis education and religious communities; but of the four areas of learning discussed, this method is least popular and doesnt appeal to the imagination of the adult educational circles. No dynamic program or follow-up research has been conducted in this area. This method is estimated to be suitable to schools than to the system of adult education. Learning to learn is a lifelong learning project. Distance Learning This is an area that has stirred the imagination of the adult learner and this process has quickly become popular. Week-end college sessions, experiments through multi-media and educational opportunities through satellite broadcasting have opened new horizons for adult learners, all over the world. Distance learning has broken all the barriers that once divided adult learners on many considerations. Smith and Castle (1992) propose the use of "experiential learning technology, facilitated from a distance, as a method of developing critical thinking skills" with "the scattered, oppressed adult population of South Africa" (p. 191). Adult education learning processes and conclusion: The above processes are not water-tight compartments. Definitional clarity to classify the process and distinguish them from one another, is a near impossibility. Many writers confuse between adult learning systems, while in reality they are referring to adult educational programs. The merits and shortcomings of each of the four learning processes detailed above, have been mentioned in the relevant sections. One important issue incidentally. The problems pertaining to the various adult learning processes are as well reflected in the normal educational system. The schools and colleges are not free from the impact of cultural, ethnic and gender factors. When that area is streamlined properly, adult learning processes of all types are bound to improve correspondingly. Merriam quotes Belangar (1996,p.21), “The question is no longer whether adult learning is needed, and how important it is. The issue today is how to respond to this increasing and diversified demand, how to manage the explosion.”(p.5-6) An individual necessarily is hooked to one or the other types of learning processes, and has much to gain from them. Works Cited: Adult Learning: An Overview 1 May 2005 ... Adult learning is frequently spoken of by adult educators ... Retrieved on April 7,2010 Baumgarter, Lisa M. Four Adult Development Theories and Their Implications for Practice;NCSALL:Volume 5, Issue B ::: October 2001. Brookfield S D 1987 Developing Critical Thinkers. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco Brookfield S D 1991 The development of critical reflection in adulthood. New Education. 13 (1): 39-48 Lindeman E C L 1926 The Meaning of Adult Education. New Republic, New York Merriam Sharan B(Author), Caffarella, Rosemary S(Author).Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series) Jossey-Bass; 1998 Mezirow J 1991 Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco Smith J E, Castle J 1992 Experiential learning for critical thinking: A viable prospect for South Africa? Int. J. of Lifelong Ed. 11 (3): 191-198. Read More