A tale of two cities (Nottingham and Chelmsford)

I spent last Friday morning at the launch of the WEA’s “Women Leading Learning” project in Nottingham. It was one of those mood-boosting days that happen in adult education when people share their stories. Students gave their testimonies about how learning had transformed their lives for the better. Occasions like this are almost evangelical. Each person’s story could be the makings of a novel, drama or film. Some women had got jobs, some had overcome depression and some had gone into local politics as a result of adult education courses. One had done all three. It was a joyful celebration.

Antonia Zenkevitch was an expert compère as WEA tutors, staff, volunteers and people from partner organisations added their voices and took part in creative activities. There are more details about the event, links to photos, including the one above, and some video clips at http://womenleadinglearning.wordpress.com/5th-october-launch-event-programme-and-details/ You can also scroll down ‘Other WEA Blogs’ in the right hand column of this page to a find a link to ‘Women Leading Learning’.

(For the record, I also support the Men’s Sheds movement http://menssheds.org.uk/.)

On Saturday I joined branch volunteers and staff at the WEA Essex Federation’s Annual General Meeting in Chelmsford. I’m grateful to their Chair, Ron Marks, for inviting me and for the opportunity to share thoughts on teaching, learning and assessment and our ambition for WEA education over the next 3 years.

There was a good turnout from the county’s 43 volunteer-led branches with reports, presentations and group discussions. Colchester MP and WEA Patron, Sir Bob Russell joined the meeting, where people raised issues about democracy and change as key themes for discussion. As well as reporting on the year’s highlights, people debated various concerns and niggles. This is natural in a democratic organisation where students, volunteers, members and staff can express their views and they can now be explored further through the appropriate channels.

WEA Essex Course Brochure 2012-13

It was encouraging to hear and read about branch activities and educational projects in Essex including a Cultural Olympiad and plans to digitise the Region’s archives. People from at least two branches mentioned that they had 96-year old students in their courses. This reminds me that I should re-check how many WEA students are over 100 years old. It’s amazing that there are some.

The balance of work done in the previous year was interesting and there were yet more descriptions of great tutors and of adult education that had given people a fresh start when their lives had seemed almost without hope. An account of student Tammy’s aspiration to become a midwife against all odds had people spellbound. Tammy had been in and out of care as a child, left school at 13 and was on a life path that seemed destined to repeat the same cycle for her own children. Her story, like Alice’s, Mel’s, Keren’s and other women who spoke in Nottingham on the previous day, offer living proof that education can be an escape route from one life path and onto a better one. We also saw evidence that learning helps to keep people active in their communities as well as stimulating their brains into their 80s and beyond..

Over the two days I heard about some of the WEA Award winners who will be honoured at our Parliamentary event on 7 November. That will definitely be another day with a feel-good effect.

Educational Thinkers’ Hall of Fame – Carol Dweck and motivation theory

Carol Dweck

Here’s another reflection about a thinker whose work influences teaching, learning and assessment in adult education. This time it’s Carol Dweck’s work on the theory of motivation.She has researched the effects of students’ beliefs about their own intelligence and how their views can affect their progress. She describes students who think that their intelligence is static as having an ‘entity’ view or a fixed mindset. She suggests that others, who believe that they can increase their intelligence through effort, have an ‘incremental’ view or a growth mindset.

In practice, her research suggests that teachers motivate students more effectively when they give feedback on the processes of learning and don’t link their assessment to the person’s assumed ability.

“That was a good way of working”, is more effective than, “You’re very clever.” A good teacher makes the link between effort and success instead of reinforcing the view that there’s a limit to what any student can achieve.

We learn by experiment and experience. We learn from what doesn’t work as well as from what does – so long as we’re not discouraged or told that we’re stupid. Allowing a student to think that they’re simply not bright enough to be successful is a self-fulfilling prophesy. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”

Teachers who are aware of Dweck’s research can motivate students by showing that:

• our brains continue to develop and to grow connections – especially if they’re stretched and exercised;
• we can improve results by putting in extra effort and trying different approaches.

Promoting a growth mindset gives students much more of a message of hope and possibility than confirming perceptions of fixed intelligence. I know from personal experience of being kept alive on artificial life support for a while in 2009 that brain function is far from fixed. It can be lost and it can be gained. Many of the gains come from other people’s expectations and encouragement.

The 2-minute video from the excellent Teachers’ Toolbox website  http://www.teacherstoolbox.co.uk/Dweck_Motivation.html explains Dweck’s motivation theory. This site has other useful video links for teachers.

Carol Dweck’s own website at: http://www.mindsetonline.com/ shows how motivation theory is relevant to many aspects of life.

Do you agree with her theory or not? What other factors might affect motivation and achievement? Thoughts and comments welcomed.

Cooperative problem solving, local democracy and family learning

“A better world – equal, democratic and just; through adult education the WEA challenges and inspires individuals, communities and society”.

This is the WEA’s vision. Many people and organisations are working for the same aim and we’re often invited to collaborate with others so that we can make a bigger impact by working together.

I’ve been involved in three separate events in the last couple of weeks with people who recognise that adult education helps to address inequalities for families and communities. These wider aspects of lifelong learning show that education isn’t just for children and young people and isn’t only about preparation for employment – important as that is.

Cooperative Problem Solving

The first event focused on cooperative problem solving. Youth and community organisations, cooperative champions, educators and academic researchers from the UK, USA, New Zealand and Sweden met at the Cambridge University’s Forum for Youth Participation & Democracy. We shared practical examples of effective community-based action to tackle unfairness and we have agreed to work in an alliance, building on shared approaches to cooperative problem solving. People who use Twitter can look out for the #CoopPS hashtag as ideas develop.

YBaCouncillor

I joined WEA volunteer Alan Bruce and manager Jol Miskin at a well-attended meeting organised by Clive Betts MP, Chair of the Department for Communities and Local Government Select Committee. The Select Committee’s meeting was part of a campaign to find out why some people become councillors and what puts others off. A 2010 report on English councillors prompted this campaign as it showed that 96% were white, the average age was 60 and that over two-thirds were male.

The WEA isn’t affliliated to any political party but we have a long tradition – over 100 years – of political education and community engagement, encouraging people to take part in politics, public life and activism, so we have been active in supporting this campaign.

Inquiry into Family Learning

Finally, I attended the first meeting of commissioners for an independent Inquiry into Family Learning, led by the National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) and chaired by Baroness Valerie Howarth, who made sure that the meeting was inclusive and focused.

There’s more information on the Inquiry at:

http://www.niace.org.uk/current-work/family-learning-inquiry

This is NIACE’s introduction to the Inquiry:

“We believe that there is a need for an independent inquiry into this area of work, not only to consider what is meant by ‘family learning’ but to ensure its place at the heart of policy, research and development. NIACE is concerned about the lack of recognition of the value of family learning, its impact on a range of policy areas and of the potential benefits for families and the wider community. We are concerned that the role of parents and carers in supporting their children’s development is not adequately recognised. Supporting children’s development is one of the major motivators that leads to adults improving their own skills.”

The twitter hashtag for the Inquiry will be #familylearninginquiry. Look out for it in coming months.

It’s reassuring to know that there are national networks of people and organisations who are promoting the importance and potential of families who learn together across generations and of education for cooperative living and democracy.

Have you got examples or suggestions of effective cooperative problem solving, engagement in local democracy or family learning – or comments on these approaches?

Educational Thinkers’ Hall of Fame – More on John Dewey

A guest blog by Alison Iredale, Senior Lecturer at Oldham College

Alison Iredale

I am grateful for Ann’s previous post on John Dewey’s influence on learning (https://annwalkerwea.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/educational-thinkers-hall-of-fame-john-dewey/).

In this post I want to offer a personal perspective related to his work on democracy and education. Some of this post appears in an article about Routinised Practices, part of my PhD thesis.

While researching Dewey at the start of my doctoral studies about 4 years ago I came across an address by Richard Pring, the soon to be retired Director of the Oxford Department of Educational Studies, to an Escalate conference in Glasgow in 2003. He recalled being blamed by Keith Joseph for the low standards in schools, due to teachers being introduced to the works of John Dewey in his department. Having just been knocked sideways professionally by Dewey’s writing myself after 20 years in vocational training and teaching I felt vindicated by my unease with the growth of standards driven education policy and processes in college based vocational education. I wondered whether the standards that Sir Keith Joseph said were falling were long in dire need of a good push. This went against all my training as a vocational teacher hitherto, where the discourse of standards and criteria dominated my teaching and my CPD.

As a teacher and trainer slurping the alphabet soup of CPVE, YTS, NVQ, GNVQ and BEC in the 80’s and 90’s I failed to question the underlying inequalities of narrowly focused quasi-skills criteria, preferring the certainties of the well constructed and cross referenced NVQ portfolio ‘owned’ by the candidate and ‘signed off’ by the internal verifier. Dewey, a pragmatist just like me, revealed that education was part of the democratic ideal, an imperative, and fundamental to the growth of an individual and society. I thought that I already endeavoured to promote transformative learning by taking risks in my lessons, introducing my students to collaborative working, new technology, and experts from the ‘real world of work’. Yet I was doing this generally within a confident, safe, collaborative, democratic, and supportive environment back then. Now, as a teacher educator I observe my own developing teachers basing their pragmatism and pedagogic decisions upon adequacy, compliance and capability because of the precarious, insecure labour conditions prevalent in the lifelong learning sector.

Central to Dewey’s writing is the notion of a democratic education. Laurence Stott (1995:31) describes his philosophy thus:

“Surely Dewey was right that humankind is implicated in an organic-material world open to intelligent and creative scientific research.

I like the word ‘implicated’ in this quotation, particularly as it suggests that I must take responsibility for my contribution to the inculcation of new teachers in the lifelong learning sector.

Dewey has been both castigated and revered, often in the same breath, by those wishing to influence educational values at a political and philosophical level. A pivotal notion surrounds his argument for growth as an end in itself, rather than growth towards a pre-determined end. Human beings recreate beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices and when individuals in a social group eventually pass away, through education the social group continues (Dewey 1916:6). This suggests to me an emphasis on education as an imperative.

Education, defined by Dewey as transmission through communication, not only ensures continuity of existence, but existence itself.  He argued strongly for experience to be favoured over instruction, in that whereas all genuine education derives from experience, not all experience is positive in the sense of being able to take an individual forward educationally. He was particularly interested in the nature of reflection, and the non-linear process of learning. Indeed for Dewey, reflection is about problem solving -the embodiment of learning as a holistic activity, taking into account the accumulated experiences of both parties.

“An experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment, whether the latter consists of persons with whom he is talking about some topic or event, the subject talked about being also a part of the situation; or the toys with which he is playing; the book he is reading […..]; or the materials of an experiment he is performing.” (Dewey, 1938:43-44).

I return to Stott’s final words on Dewey’s influence in North America:

‘Dewey’s educational experiment-revolution designed to bring democracy to North America has not been successful: its humanistic promises lie unfulfilled, and classroom group activities can be even more oppressive and less growthful than superior class instruction. Education is at the crossroads’. (1995:32)

I find his conclusion troubling when viewed through the lens of the dominant discourses emanating from this coalition government.

References

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. An introduction to the philosophy of education (1966 edn.), New York: Free Press.

Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education, New York: Collier Books. (Collier edition first published 1963)

Iredale, A. (2012) Down the rabbit-hole: Routinised Practices, Dewey and Teacher Training in the Lifelong Learning Sector, Journal of Higher Education, Skills and Work Based Learning, 2:1.

Stott, L (1995) ‘Dewey a Disaster?’ International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 18: 1, 27 — 33

Educational Thinkers’ Hall of Fame – Sonia Nieto

Sonia Nieto is an inspiring educational thinker. Much of her writing is relevant to adult education although her experience is as a teacher-educator and classroom teacher in the American public (state) school system.

I really liked this section from page 76 of her book, What Keeps Teachers Going? (Sonia Nieto. New York: Teachers’ College Press, 2003). She describes the characteristics that we value in our WEA tutors.

(If you’re new to this, pedagogy means the art or science of being a teacher.)

Quoted text from Sonia Nieto (with the author’s kind permission)

“Good teachers think deeply and often about the craft of teaching and the process of learning. They are not simply technicians who know how to write good lesson plans and use collaborative groups effectively, although this is also part of what they do. Above all, excellent teachers are engaged every day in intellectual work, the kind of serious undertaking that demands considerable attention and thought. They devote substantial time and energy to their teaching and, over time, they develop extensive expertise and confidence in the work they do. Henry Giroux has defined teachers as intellectuals in this way: “in order to function as intellectuals, teachers must create the ideology and structured conditions necessary for them to write, research , and work with each other in producing curricula and sharing power…. As intellectuals, they will combine reflection and action in the interest of empowering students with the skills and knowledge needed to address injustices and to be critical actors committed to developing a world free of oppression and exploitation.”

All good teachers, whether they consciously carry out research or not, are researchers in the broadest sense of the word. This is because good teachers are also learners, and they recognise that they need to keep learning throughout their careers if they are to improve. They probe their subject matter, constantly searching for material that will excite and motivate their students; they explore pedagogy to create a learning environment that is both rigorous and supportive; they talk with their colleagues about difficult situations. Above all, they value the intellectual work that is at the core of teaching.”

Further thoughts? 

• How can we tell the difference between a teacher who is an intellectual and one who is a ‘technician’?
• Does this approach apply to other jobs and roles (especially in the WEA?)
• Why might the difference matter to students and to society?
• Has a tutor inspired you with an intellectual approach?

There’s more information about Sonia Nieto at http://www.sonianieto.com/index.html

Postscript

Thanks for various emails responding to this thread, including one from Phill O’Brien from the WEA’s North West Region who sent this link to teaching and learning resources:

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/about.htm

Can the Work Programme do the whole job?

Allegations of major fraud and exploitation in welfare to work schemes have hit the headlines in recent months with businesses such as A4E and Working Links being investigated. Now there has been adverse publicity about stewards’ work placements at the Jubilee river pageant. Various media reports claim that some unpaid security staff had to work in appalling conditions. 

These apparent problems are set against even bigger issues about the overarching Work Programme and welfare to work schemes.

The Work Programme’s model is one of payment by results. Organisations working with unemployed people are only paid after their clients have completed a specified period in a job.  Many experienced charities and community organisations with proven track records of moving people into work are squeezed out of the process as they can’t deal with the cash-flow problems and risk. Ironically the charity Groundwork South West took the gamble of taking on a Work Programme contract but ended up making 130 of its own staff redundant (according to the Guardian, Saturday 9 June).

Worsening economic conditions in some parts of the country since the Work Programme was established mean that there aren’t enough vacancies to fill. Those with the fewest skills are competing with people who have been made redundant in ever more unstable economic circumstances.  With fewer secure jobs, the organisations contracted to support people in their progress from welfare to work have dwindling chances of being paid for their own work. Unemployed people, in turn, are more likely to be exploited and disillusioned by any work placements that don’t lead to real jobs. 

Where does this leave people who can’t find work? We have to count the human cost of poverty, depression and hopelessness and recognise the inter-generational impact as more parents are jobless. The social and economic effects will ripple further into the future if we don’t have adaptable people ready to work when the economy recovers and there are jobs to be created and filled. Meanwhile, the state will have to bear the cost of benefits and the associated strains on public spending arising from worklessness.

Decent employment is the best anti-poverty strategy and it’s time to be more imaginative about progressive education and training for unemployed people so that we can get through the recession and prepare for better economic conditions. Community learning has a role to play where people are likely to remain jobless for sustained periods. Investing in learning communities who can generate ideas and enthusiasm will improve our capacity for recovery and help us to avoid the tragic and dangerous legacy of inactivity and lost potential.

We need to focus on developing people’s motivation, resilience, adaptability, general competence and attitudes and to recognise that a narrow range of task-related skills can become obsolete as a result of rapidly changing technology. Education in functional skills, where needed, and in creative, research and analytical skills encourage people to think for themselves and to respond constructively to change. People with these attributes and an ability to work effectively with others are more likely to be flexible and able to cope with new workplace demands.

Wherever possible, we should be supporting unemployed people into current job vacancies and creating more opportunities but we could be storing up major problems unless we use complementary approaches to work ethically with people who remain jobless. Individual stories from the recent Adult Learners’ Week showed how some people who were far from employability bridged the gap through education.

Formerly unemployed Sarah Cornwall who started her own business after learning with the WEA

A recent positive Ofsted survey of the WEA’s contribution to employability confirmed that our distinctive and complementary approaches and partnerships offer different ways of working decently with unemployed people. We showed that students gain employment – or even create their own – following short, part-time courses ranging from Helping in Schools, Community Interpreting, Health and Wellbeing, Confidence and Assertiveness and even Family History – although these courses were not promoted as being work-related.  

The survey gave us food for thought as we refine our strategy as part of our wider educational programme and in line with our charitable aims. Working with people who might be left behind in the competition for jobs is a moral responsibility and an economic and social imperative.