Response to "You Probably Don't Even Know I Exist - Notes from a College Prison Program"

While I was reading “You Probably Don't Even Know I Exist - Notes from a College Prison Program” by Jane Mahr, I was forced to face my identity as an adult learner, more specifically as a struggling adult learner because of one particular sentence, “ Approximately 45% of the women at Bedford Hills suffer from mental illness, and some of these women place into the pre-college program,” (91). This statistic came up in our class discussion, and it was a shocking and sad number for my classmates. The gist of the discussion around the presence of mental illness in prison learning contexts was something I paraphrased in my head as, “They really need teachers to help them. I want to help them cope with the difficulty of their life circumstances by giving them power through literacy skills and options through further education.”

Like my classmates, I had that urge to help them. I would not be in this program if I wasn’t deeply moved to my core by a desperate need to help people get the power of self-expression and choice through language and literacy education. However, these women in prison fighting against disabling mental illness, and struggling for their education are not people I just recognize as my future students, I recognize their stories on a more personal level because they are like me. I wanted to go into adult education not just because I wanted to help, but because I am desperate for help balancing challenging circumstances and my education, and for a teacher like the one I hope to be. I wish I had a Jane Mahr in my life to see that I exist and coach me through struggling through school.

Another part of my identity is a struggling adult learner. I have had major interruptions in my education because I have struggled with depression my entire adult life. My mind is cloudy, I can’t concentrate, and I have little energy or motivation an overwhelming majority of the time. I have lost many things and opportunities because of my mood disorder (money, work advancement, time, friends, romantic relationships, physical possessions, physical health), but none of these losses devastate me as much as my loss of education. From my perspective as an academic and an educator, I love language and I feel free, successful, and safe when I am learning. From my perspective as a mentally ill person, school has been an overwhelming source of stress, embarrassment, and confusion.

Unlike many of the women who Jane Mahr teaches at Bedford Hills, I had a fairly privileged upbringing with quality and well-rounded education, and a 3.8 GPA in high school. I have always been able to get into programs I wanted. I got into my first choice university early decision and after I eventually completed my BA in English at CCNY 4 years after my planned college graduation, I got into a competitive alternative teacher certification program, which would pay for my master’s in Secondary English Education. Despite this advantage over these women in prison, I still have faced enormous obstacles in my education. Due to bouts of depression ranging from moderate to severe, I have dropped out of school three times. I left my dream college twice (at 19 and at 20) because of hospitalizations for severe depression and suicide attempts. Last year I became suicidal again while teaching high school English and getting my degree in English education; I was forced to learn a free Master’s and a job behind. Pressure and mental illness caused my educational goals, and a big part of myself, to crumble in a world much safer and simpler than prison.

I have been intrigued by the context of teaching in prisons for several years and I have not been able to identify why until this blog post. I see myself in these women, and I have experienced a fragment of the grief of losing out on education due to illness and life circumstances; I have found it to be crippling. I want to help them, because I want us to help each other as a community. I think that I could potentially have a beautifully meaningful experience as a teacher/co-learner in a prison classroom. I hope that I can manage to fight my way to this Master’s. I want to have the opportunity to have that transformative experience as both the giver of healing and strength to my students, but also as the recipient of those gifts through the participation in the learning experience alongside them.

Response to "The CWE Qualitative Evaluation Report 2013-2014"

            I really enjoyed reading The Consortium for Worker Education’s Qualitative Evaluation Report 2013-2014. This surprised me, since at first glance, this type of text serves the dry and logistical function of helping to maintain and earn funding. I was impressed by the persuasive and personal touches that were featured in this report: dozens of voices of enthusiastic teachers, students and administrators; warm and personal letters from satisfied employers; and dozens of details that made each unique site tangible and inviting. On a metacognitive level, I realized that this is the type of writing my fieldwork report should seek to emulate, and on a personal level, I was profoundly inspired to learn more about Community Based Organizations.

            Before reading this evaluation, I had not known what a Community Based Organization was, never mind that this sort of deeply personal context for supporting language and literacy students would be a one that I would be highly interested in. More than any other document this semester, I believe the CWE Qualitative Evaluation Report had the most concrete impact on transforming my perspectives and provoking me to apply my learning. After reading this document, I decided to change my fieldwork site, suggested the Iron Worker’s union to a friend for her boyfriend, and scribbled several teaching best practices in my personal journal. It felt like a really authentic text. It was also a relevant text to my particular goals and interests in teaching English to adult learners, particularly my interest in promoting improvement of quality of life through literacy, and having a classroom that features a strong collaboration between teachers and students.

            I especially loved an anecdote from Nathaniel Eggleston, an instructor at the Community Walk-In Program for work training at Henry Street Settlement because he talked about his classroom like how I would like to talk about my future classroom. He was enthusiastic and described his role as primarily a facilitator in the classroom.

Eggleston’s final comments elaborate on the participants and staff learning from each other: ‘The staff that we have don’t see themselves necessarily as educators, they see themselves as job developers and recruiters. … I had one [especially diverse] training group … I did no instruction [with this group] — I walked in and said, “How do you do a cover letter?” The older women in the class didn’t know how to use a computer very well, so the young adults could help them out. But those women knew how to do that letter correctly—they knew how to do the paragraphs and the sentences and make sure the format was right. So they were able to help the young people. And I could literally just let it happen! … Collectively, the group in the room has twice the experience that I do!’” (D’Amico, 97)

This anecdote caused me to have a visceral reaction of excitement about my future career working with adult learners. Adult learners have diverse backgrounds and really bring a tremendous wealth of experience and knowledge they can share. I also liked that this was a concrete example of how to have a classroom where the teacher is an authentic collaborator in the classroom. In my last blog post, I wrote about my concerns about learning to achieve a classroom where teachers and students were co-learners. This model of a teacher posing a real-world task and encouraging collaboration to achieve it seems like a model I could easily apply in my own classroom.

            This passage shifted how I thought about several aspects of my career as an adult educator. I discovered that writing for funding and bureaucratic reasons can still be energetic and have captivating voice in its own way. I started to get closer to identifying how to put the model of teachers and students as collaborators into practice. I also got a glimpse into the way I would like to think about my future teaching. In many ways, this instructor’s quote resonated with me enough that I could use its content as a “pseudo rubric” for how reflection on effective teaching should sound. And last, but not least, I learned that I think a CBO is “right up my alley”; I would like to explore ways that I can simultaneously explore how adult language and literacy instructors can also touch on the exciting content of vocational skills.

Response to "Teaching Adult English Language Learners"

I appreciated how cogent and personal Richard Orem’s Teaching Adult Language Learners was. The book in general was brief, but the content seemed to be chosen with such care. Since Orem seemed to have such a personal relationship with the material he chose, I paid extra attention when he occasionally extensively summarized the work of another author. I was especially intrigued by Orem’s commentary on Jane Vella’s Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach: The Power of Dialogue in Educating Adults because it centered on two values I think are essential in the adult classroom—strong teacher-student relationships and dialogue—that are particularly abstract concepts for young teachers to learn to plan and integrate into a syllabus.

I thought it was interesting that Orem focused his audience’s attention on principle # 9, the acknowledgement of the power difference between teacher and learner, so much more than the other principles. I wanted to explore hypothetical reasons for his rationale for doing this on my blog, as well as consider potential classroom applications of this thinking and further research I can do on this topic. Orem describes principle # 9 as follows,

(Vella) draws an example from a conversation that she had with Paolo Freire in which Freire said, ‘Only the student can name the moment of the death of the professor.’ (p. 17). Vella is telling us that so long as there is a power gap between teacher and student, learning will not take place effectively. The learner and teacher must see themselves as collaborators in the process of problem solving. Given the power gaps that exist within certain cultures (Hofstede, 1980), it is no wonder that some students have a difficult time warming up to the idea of the teacher and student as co-learners. (Orem, 11).

Upon reading this passage again, I believe that Orem highlights the difficulty of establishing the teacher and student as co-learners because he sees this as a challenge instilled in some learners culturally.  I think that is an interesting idea, especially when I juxtapose it with the sociological research that Orem describes later in his book that shows that different cultures have different attitudes and preferences in relating with power. I think that a lot of this passage still bothers me though.

Vella’s commentary from Freire involving the “death” of the professor as a prerequisite for a true relationship where the teacher and student are co-learners seems extreme to me. I have not read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, so I only have a sense of the theories of Freire. However, I would like to believe that some authentic dialogue and learning could exist before my future students see me as a collaborator. Also, the implication of such a radical, even painful, shift in the classroom culture being necessary seems difficult. It also brings me to the second part of this quote that still confuses me. Orem says that this relationship between the teacher and student and collaborators is primarily difficult because of resistance for the student to adhere to these roles.

I would like to argue that I believe that participating collaboratively is equally difficult for the teacher. It is easier to lead with sheer authority and by giving the information to students rather than guiding them to it. Culturally, I believe that teachers also adopt the perception that teachers must be authorities as much as students do. Teachers and students have the same concept of “the teacher” in their minds, except the teachers have to fight a concept they have been also taught to imitate. In many ways, I think I have to figure out how to kill that image of the teacher as much as much as my future students do. I have noticed in my class presentations that I switch to “teacher mode” by giving bold directives, and performing; I do not feel like my student self when I am teaching my peers. This seems problematic, or at least feels awkward. I am not sure how to coach myself to have a persona that balances authenticity with leadership and student inquiry with the obligation to provoke discussion. I definitely agree that this is the most difficult of Vella’s principles.

I believe that I need to do a few things to further develop a more authentic co-learner teaching persona. It seems obligatory to read scholarship in this area such as Vella’s book and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In addition, I believe I need to teach myself through one of Vella’s other principles influenced by Freire: praxis. I need to teach more, particularly in contexts where students guide instruction more, then reflect on it. I think an ongoing reflection on the process of tutoring an adult, would help me develop a better understanding of being a co-learner, then I could translate this relationship between one student and myself to a larger group.

Response to "Andragogy and Self-Directed Learning: Pillars of Adult Learning Theory"

          I was honestly surprised that so much of Teaching Adult Writers in Diverse Contexts centered on lifespan development and its relationship to how adults learn. I am aware that elementary and secondary school certification programs require a course in developmental psychology for their future teachers, but I had not anticipated discussing similar content to teach adult learners. I think that I had assumed that this content was less relevant for educators of older students because their role is less directly related to educating their students socially and emotionally. I was surprised andragogy even existed as a unique theory.

I was relieved that my uncertainty about accepting an isolated field of andragogy has been echoed in the works of scholars of adult learning. Sharan B. Merriam highlights the controversy of a dichotomous structure of andragogy versus pedagogy in her essay, “Andagogy and Self-Directed Learning: Pillars of Adult Learning Theory”. Like critics of the original version of Knowles’ theory of andragogy, I have a difficult time classifying adults as exclusively intrinsically motivated, and youth students as entirely teacher-dependent. I personally cannot even say that I always fit the template of an ideal adult learner based on Knowles’ criteria. I was very intrigued by the revision of Knowles’ philosophy that Merriam described,

That these assumptions [about an ideal adult learner] were not necessarily true of all adults led Knowles himself to revise his thinking as to whether andragogy was just for adults and pedagogy just for children. Between 1970 and 1980 he moved from an andragogy versus pedagogy position to representing them on a continuum ranging from teacher-directed to student directed learning. He acknowledged that both approaches are appropriate with children and adults, depending on the situation. (6)

I find that a variation of andragogy as a spectrum is much more in line with my personal experience both as a learner and as an instructor. I believe that some of the most memorable educational moments in my youth featured more elements of andragogy rather than pedagogy. I have always loved to write and I used this motivation to really excel at self-directed creative writing projects throughout my elementary and secondary education. When I work with teens in the pre-vocational skills class I teach, I ask them to be self-directed and identify their own goals, and lead many class activities. Generally, the more self-directed I ask my students to be, the more professionalism and engagement I get from them in class.  

I think pedagogy is relevant and necessary for learners of all ages, too. Children feel secure in positive, predictable environments with strong routines. Likewise, adults seem to need these foundations for their learning to be successful as well, particularly in writing and learning language. Though I tend to respond to opportunities for self-directed and reflective learning much better than teacher-directed techniques, modeling is an essential element of pedagogy that I find necessary for my learning style. I felt more confident about pursuing writing an ethnography, despite it being a new writing style for me, with the guidance of teacher and student-written models.

Since I have worked with learners of all ages and I am a strong proponent of the features of andragogy for youth I work with, I am excited to continue to learn more about andragogy, particularly in relation to pedagogy. I believe this will expand into a dynamic exploration of universal design theory, and how it can unite these two approaches to instruction. I also think that this exploration will create a unique and meaningful basis for me to build my philosophy of teaching upon.