Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adultsPapers from the 28th Annual SCUTREAConference
Post-modern Teaching: the Facilitation of Learning
Li-Jiuan Lilie Tsay, School Of Continuing Education, University of Nottingham, UK
Introduction
The notion of ‘global classroom’ has spread widely in a few decades. In Taiwan, as a result of a dramatic economic growth and the ending of martial law in the 1980s, there has been a tremendous effect on the Taiwanese society. It has since been given the impetus to move towards a metropolitan society. Jarvis states: ‘Taiwan’s society has progressed into a post-modern one.’ (1996)
As a result of these changes, the trend of overseas study tours has been generated to complement traditional classroom teaching in Taiwan as occurs elsewhere. My research focuses on what learning impact the study tour can have upon adult students. The research samples the Taiwanese students who went abroad (to Europe, but especially to the UK) to study a particular interest during a period of time ranging between a few days to months. It includes both qualitative (interview and participant observation) and quantitative (questionnaire) investigations. Although the research area and samples are for Taiwanese consideration, ideas from the research can be applied to most study tours.
Using examples from my research, I aim to demonstrate the importance on making connections between research, teaching and learning and also on the facilitation of learning in post-modern education.
The Study Tour as an Adult Education Activity in Post-modern Society
In the last few decades, society has progressed into a post-modern age. The changes in society can be evidenced in political, economic, social, cultural and educational contexts. Westwood (1991) has outlined a post-modern agenda for adult education. She suggests (1991, 44) that ‘the debates surrounding post-modernism have a special resonance for adult education and should be on the current agenda’. The perspective of adult education is therefore essential here.
The ideas of adult education cover a great range of activities in which adult learners engage, in order to improve or broaden their existing knowledge, skills or abilities. The debates therefore centre on the issues of ‘what sort of knowledge, skills or abilities can be regarded as adult learning activities’ and ‘what methods of teaching can be applied to them’.
Many adult educators have offered different definitions of the term ‘adult education’: Legge (1982), Groombridge (1983), Rogers (1986), Elsey (1986), Long (1987), Liver (1969) and Haygood (1969) have all defined it in their own way. Jarvis (1995) implies that adult education is associated with the idea of liberal education. Jarvis (1995) states that:
The term ‘adult education’ carries specific connotations in the United Kingdom which implies that it is specifically liberal education, and this also has a stereotype of being a middle-class, leisure time pursuit. Underlying this implication is the idea that the adult’s education has been completed and during leisure time, the adult self-indulgently improves or broadens existing knowledge, skills or hobbies.
(1995, 20)
Jarvis believes that adult education should aspire to be liberal education. Indeed, the liberal aim is one of the purposes of adult education (Elsey, 1986). The well-known1919 Report points out that adult education involves a wide range of learning activities, processes and agencies. From this point of view, study tours can be included within the concept of adult education.
Knowles (1970, 38) defines andragogy as ‘the art and science of helping adults learn’. In a recent clarification of assumptions of andragogy, Knowles (1979) acknowledges that andragogy focuses the attention on the continuum of adulthood. He claims (1973, 27) that Confucius and Lao Tse of China, Jesus in Biblical time, Aristotle, Socrates and Plato in ancient Greece all ‘perceived learning to be a process of active inquiry, not passive reception of transmitted content’. Jarvis (1987, 11) contends that adult learning ‘is not just a psychological process that happens in splendid isolation from the world in which the learner lives, but is intimately related to that world and affected by it.’ It is important to learn people’s value and culture especially in this post-modern perspective. Rather than learning from the available words, the best way of experiencing this is to ‘be there’. Hutcheon (1989, 8) states: ‘the post-modern appears to coincide with a general cultural awareness’.
As the world is changing rapidly in political, economical and social dimensions, the ‘way of delivering knowledge’ needs adjusting. The reason for having the study tour in the past was to offer the aristocracy a ‘further education’ after normal schools; at the present time, the purposes of the study tour are both to provide a completion of classroom teaching and also to enable students to cope with changes in society, politics and economy. By actually ‘being there’ to experience the culture, the study tour helps in developing a student’s state of mind and furthermore helps them to cope with the changes in society.
The rapidly changing phenomenon, the learning environment of the overseas study tour, contains freedom and uncertainty, to which traditional classroom teaching methods can no longer be applied. One may ask whether there is a certain way of imparting knowledge from tutors to students and whether tutors play the same roles as they used to in this post-modern society. By research into the experience and practice of the overseas study tour, this paper aims to focus on the idea that: ‘Teaching is one way in which learning is facilitated (Jarvis, 1995)’.
Study tours involve the experiences of other cultures, especially, when travel to other countries is involved. The level of cross-cultural interaction will increase. Thomas (1991, 18) implies that adult education can encourage the view that cultural diversity is the great new reality of our age and that we have to learn to live with people through difference.
Many people argue that the barrier between “visiting a place” and “doing a study tour” is vague. Whether the study tour is a part of adult education will depend on the study tour itself; whether it embraces a certain level of educational and cultural objectives for the students. People might argue that the study tour is more recreation than education. However, what should be remembered here is that Elsey (1986) states that recreation is also one of the aims of adult education.
Some debates in the Global Classroom Conference in 1997 are related to ‘self’ and ‘others’ in relation to the study tour. Some argue that the study tour can either improve one’s cultural awareness towards one’s own or embrace others’ cultures. Sarup has offered his view on this by explaining ‘particularity’ and ‘universality’. He states:
Particularity refers to the individual agent. Every man, to the extent that he is human, would like--on the one hand--to be different from all others. But on the other hand he would like to be recognized, in his unique particularity itself, as a positive value; and he would like this recognition to be shown as many people as possible. Universality refers to the social aspect of man’s existence. It is only in and by the universal recognition of human particularity that individuality realizes and manifests itself. (1988, 23)
The argument here is that the study tour has urged students from ‘individual’ towards ‘social’ dimensions. This can help one to experience and learn more about other cultures and at the same time be more aware of one’s own. The idea of the study tour should be regarded as a means of developing personal growth (by this I mean experiential learning, cognitive learning and self-directed learning) and social advancement in the context of cultural education.
The role of teacher in post-modern society aims to facilitate learning--’assisting adults to make sense of and act upon the personal, social, occupational, and political environment which they live in’ (Brookfield, 1986, Preface vii). Although teaching is not always needed during the study tour, the teachers seem to face a bigger challenge--that is to provide prompt guidance, help and correction and to trigger students’ experiencing their own self-realisation.
Research Findings
From the results, a pattern of teaching was found. Among all my 9 research groups, there was no specific way of passing knowledge to students from tutors. Tutors did not actually teach, they have performed their role differently in the study tour, preferring instead to provide their care and prompt help when it was needed. In addition, one role of the tutors was to help to improve the interactions between the students. When the interactions were high, the learning was enhanced. This provided the learners with a friendly atmosphere, a secure feeling and guidance while learning. Rogers’s (1986, 118) four main roles for teachers: a leader of the group (to keep the group together and things going), an agent of change(to help to bring about changes in skills, knowledge, understanding and behaviour), a member of the group and an audience are in evidence here. Teaching is no longer seen traditionally but rather as a method of facilitating learning.
In the overseas study tour, learners can encounter any sort of problems both in terms of the subject studied and also in the real world. In overseas study tours, students may encounter more problems than at home both in culture and in life. When students met problems and tried to solve them, tutors, at this moment, were more facilitators rather than teachers. A significant finding of this research was that a lot of students stated that they benefited more from those experiences than from their original purposes in attending the study tour, no matter what these were.
Parker (1997) states that adult learners receive shocks (in terms of learning) from time to time. Those ‘shocks’ can be negative or positive. Being in an unfamiliar foreign setting, students lose their confidence and experience social shock to varying degrees. When adult learners face shocks in life or learning, the learning outcomes can be unexpected (Parker, 1997).
When students are in a foreign setting, their knowledge of the local culture and life may be limited, although there might have been some pre-tour preparations. The student starts learning through first-hand contact--what is seen, what is felt and what is understood. The student can not avoid confronting and encountering problems which can affect learning. The student has to learn how to solve these problems. Through experiencing and problem-solving, great achievements in learning may result.
In an overseas study tour, many unexpected encounters may occur. According to the students’ answers, most of their negative feelings stemmed from being ‘insecure’. When a negative feeling or experience happens to the students, the role of the teacher is to facilitate and accommodate the learning. Traumatic experiences, as Torbirn (1994, 35) implies, can be used later on in the learning as a good adjustment if the compensation of the mistaken situation is improved. Therefore, prompt help and facilitation of learning are considered crucial, especially when problems occur.
Dewey (1938) highly recommends that learning through experience is important and necessary in terms of education. Although, he has pointed out a few conflicts between traditional education and actual experience, he still thinks, at the end, that there is a connection between both. It was found that the respondents benefited most in terms of their personal experiences. These experiences can be categorised into two areas: students’ personal achievement (being more independent, more open-minded and more aware of what they want and what knowledge has been learned) and learning about other cultures (attitudes and the concepts of other cultures as well as awareness of their own culture). These two areas of change seem to reflect the theory of experiential learning.
In terms of personal achievement, many students thought that what they had learned most in the study tour was ‘becoming more open-minded’, ‘becoming more independent’, ‘becoming more assertive’, ‘having a more cosmopolitan view’ and ‘learning to work in a team’ etc.. According to the research, when students were put in a foreign setting, not only had they ‘to learn’, but also ‘to survive’ and ‘communicate’. Asking for directions, taking the underground or making friends, students had to overcome the fear of breaking the cultural barriers and the fear of speaking a foreign language. They also had to learn how to take care of themselves. As Torbirn (1994, 35) implies, the impact of a sojourn abroad is the personal growth which indicates more as a matter of increased understanding rather than the changes of behaviours or reactions.
The influence from being in a foreign culture can be greater than what the learners expected before the tour, as many students stated that they learned a lot from other cultures. Learning about a culture does not mean just learning from the people, but also from everything in the places visited. Dilsaver and Panton (1989) state:
More broadly, they may absorb information about societies and cultures in a form which no textbook can convey, as a result of direct contact with local people in their own environment. (1989, 45)
In the study tour, students are introduced to a new civilisation. When students visit fields, museums, places of interest or have language courses, they contact different cultures and they learn from them. Hence, the cultural context is important to the study tour. Of course, before the tour students have their own thinking, expectation, insight, understanding and evaluation about the places visited. How their concept about the cultures visited changes will depend on the contact with these cultures. Understanding the fact that different people have their own cultures (as reflected in their behaviour, words thoughts etc.) and being aware that those cultures might appear in different forms, can help students interact more confidently and enjoyably with others who are culturally different. Adler (1975) says:
In the encounter with another culture the individual gains new experiential knowledge by coming to understand the roots of his or her own ethnocentrism and by gaining new perspectives and outlooks on the nature of culture... Paradoxically, the more one is capable of experiencing new and different dimensions of human diversity, the more one learns of oneself. (1975, 22)
From the results of the survey, the level of contact with foreign cultures in these three types of study tour did not make much of a difference, although the level of contact was higher when students lived with host families. After the study tour, the students said that they could accept the other cultures better and, furthermore, they became more aware of their own culture. Some students even thought that after the study tour, they felt that they had become more patriotic and more aware of their own culture.
At the same time, however, globalisation induces effects of cultural specificity... The globalisation of culture, then, far from repressing the local and the specific, actually stimulates it. (Usher, Bryant & Johnston, 1997, 3-4)
Mind can be cultivated through the interaction with human culture. One of the contributions of the study tour, both in culture and education, is to create a ‘cultured person’ (Williams, 1989, 11). Conforming to different cultural environments’ is a means of doing this. The term ‘cultured person’ in this post-modern age means something different than it previously did. It can involve knowledge of a range of different ethnic cultural experiences. Jones (1996) indicates that multi-cultural experiences can provide students with the chance to reinforce their conception and maybe to correct their misconception about other cultures. Prinz (1988) states that such experience will provide positive changes for students about other cultures.
The role of the teachers and the interrelationship between the role of the teacher and that of the facilitator are evident in this research. As an agent of change, the teacher needs to praise and be aware of students’ changes in terms of their new skills, knowledge and experiences. By doing this, the teacher can help to ensure that students become more aware of their own learning styles, interests and of themselves--that is ‘self-realisation’. Brookfield (1986) suggests:
Through developing such a sense of their uniqueness and of their ability to control aspects of the teaching-learning interaction, learners will find that their personal investment in, as well as their motivation for, learning is enhanced. (1986, 61)
Connections between Research, Teaching and Learning
It happens very often that researcher, teacher and learner do their job without communicating with each other. In my research, it was found that the students had made a lot of complaints concerning the quality of the tutors and the arrangement of the study tour. This phenomenon has reduced the quality of learning.
In Rogers’s (1986) three categories of his learning contract, there are provider, teacher, and learner. Rogers recommends that teacher and student should negotiate the course outline together; provider and teacher should participate in the decision making over the course; provider should seek student’s opinions about the course outline.