Adult Education Theories & Tools
Branch Out by Vrindy Spencer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Branch Out by Vrindy Spencer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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My future career path is unclear and developing before my eyes.
In 5 years I would like to have completed the facilitator’s training with Courage and Renewal, develop, coordinate, and facilitate programs for adults in the area of personal development, spiritual practice/mindfulness, and connecting with others/community. In the meanwhile I will continue working with models, such as: Courage and Renewal: Circles of Trust Family Constellations Co-Counselling / Re-evaluative Counselling The Work Immunity to Change Non-Violent Communication Art of Hosting And explore some more, such as Daring Greatly, International Facilitators Association I believe diving further into these models, finding speaking opportunities, and spaces to facilitate will be my next steps. I will attend further workshops in the model of Circle of Trust and Family Constellations, continue meeting with people to practice The Work and Co-Counselling, and start a study group for Immunity to Change. I want to expand my personal brand and edit my website, resume, and linked-in. I recently received the opportunity to do a Tedx Talk in Squamish and run a program at the Naramata Centre. Both of these will be excellent opportunities to expand my professional development.
Brookfield talks about the value and importance of modelling the behaviour you promote. "As a teacher I have to earn the right to ask students to engage seriously in discussion by first modelling my own serious commitment to it" (p.230). I respect the concept of earning the right as a teacher and evaluating one's own positions of power. I see facilitation similarly and group dynamics are vital to the success of a program, including how the participants see the facilitator and how the facilitator sees the participants. I created some community guidelines for my programs that describe exactly the type of behaviour I would like to model: Personally, my biggest challenges/areas of growth are to welcome my own inner wisdom, trust the inner wisdom of others, and adopt loving curiosity. It took practice to welcome the experience of having the answers to my own questions and to not look for advice from others. I now readily welcome and ache for that sort of space-holding, which I find is often something I have to specifically request. In terms of trusting the inner wisdom of others, I find that I am not sure how to guide them in internal processing and resort to wanting to ask questions guiding them towards my own experiences or wisdom. Finally, adopting loving curiosity I can find challenging when coming up against my own growth edges, those sticky places that I am sensitive to, such as when someone speaks about eating meat or not understanding microaggression. I dive more easily into giving and receiving support and acknowledgment and holding silence. Although every area comes with its own well-worn pathways and areas of dense forest, yet to be explored. Reference
Brookfield, Stephen. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (3rd ed.). San Fransisco: John Wiley & Sons. Beautiful truths about the value of complex thinking and awareness. As part of a team starting a non-profit, program evaluation is something on my mind. How do we ensure that we are meeting the needs of individuals and communities we want to support? How do we ensure that participants are receiving the support we intend / that our programs are successful? The aim of a program evaluation is to: "collect and analyze information about the program’s activities, characteristics, and outcomes. Make judgements about the program, improve its effectiveness, and/or to inform programming decisions.” The elements of a program evaluation include:
A huge next step for our non-profit is to begin evaluating the needs within our populations, our services, and the outcomes of our services.
In the book, The Skillful Teacher, Stephen Brookfield talks about ways to lecture creatively. One that caught my eye particularly was spatial cues.
I love the concept of incorporating other parts of our brain to learn and to create different learning environments. What if we shifted our own bodies as we learnt about different concepts? For example, what if we encouraged participants to hold their arms together (hugging their bodies) when learning about challenging subjects, or gathering a blanket to comfort their physical body while their critical thinking is challenged? Especially after thinking of topics such as privilege and power, I would like to incorporate some of these new ways of thinking into my programs. (As a sidenote, speaking about spatial cues... check out this cool experiment where simply colour coding food as healthy or unhealthy impacted buyers choices here) References
Brookfield, Stephen. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (3rd ed.). San Fransisco: John Wiley & Sons. I found myself searching for tools to explain the concept of privilege to others, especially people unaware of the concepts, in an inclusive and open way. I believe one of the biggest challenges to learning new ideas is the fear of the impact that having these new thoughts may have. For example, understanding that privilege may come from birth, as opposed to hard work, goes against many of our cultural assumptions. I have copied below some of the best simple resources I found for starting or sparking these conversations. It is impossible to see the air we breathe until we have an alternative. Similarly, privilege pervades our lenses if we do not know people who do not fit the 'norm' of society. Here are some graphics of levels of oppression that exist: In the book The Skillful Teacher, Brooksfield talks about the value of sharing narrative when delving into these complex subjects (p.116). I have attempted a brief sliver of my personal narrative. I have only in the last few years begun a deeper investigation into oppressions, privilege, and power. I did not accept for most of my life that I was any different from others I was around, although I experienced many micro-aggressions throughout my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. I remember people asking me if I am from Surrey, because of my dark skin and the assumption that all Indians live in Surrey. I had a teacher in grade 8 ask me, after we watched Bride and Prejudice, whether we have cheorographed dance like that at Indian weddings. I cannot count the amount of times I've been asked my 'background,' 'nationality,' or 'ethnicity' within minutes of meeting someone. I have also lost track of the amount of times I've been asked what language I speak or if I speak 'Indian.' I have a distinct memory of the feeling of disbelief and perception of dismissal when, in a conversation at work, I mentioned that after coming back from exchange in India I felt the most disconnected I ever have from my classmates, because when I compared my skin colour to others in the classrooms in India, I finally matched them, and my supervisor at the time said she had never noticed my skin colour. When I hear remarks like that, I can only shake my head and question our societal structure, where someone, particularly someone in power, does not understand her implicit biases. On the other hand, I also have distinct memories of thinking of women professors as "motherly," of assuming people's sexuality and gender as straight and cys, of ignoring people that could not speak english well, and of walking faster and avoiding eye contact when I passed by a man of colour on the street. I am SO GRATEFUL conversations about privilege and power are increasing and infiltrating the education system and I am in enough of a position of security to question my way of being in the world and sort through the discomfort of my own past experiences on both sides of oppressive structures. I believe these understandings are vital to greater individual, relational, community, societal, and world well-being. Reference Brookfield, S. D. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (3rd ed.). San Fransisco: John Wiley & Sons.
Stephen Brooksfield talks about growing into the truth of teaching as, “developing a trust, a sense of intuitive confidence, in the accuracy and validity of our judgments and insights” (2015, p.9).
I created a few of my own personal truths:
References
A history of my introduction for taking the PIDP can be found here.
My background is in facilitation and curriculum development, although I did not use those words until later in life. Since I was a young child, I would go to libraries to get activity booklets to plan all of my birthday parties. When I was 17, I made a 500-page activity booklet based on a compilation of past summer camps or other programs I’d attended. For my undergraduate thesis, I designed a 3-month program for students to ‘explore and express authentic identity;’ a community for community’s sake. Currently, my Professional Practice course will guide me through discovering how to receive feedback on my facilitating. I have found this to be a vitally important tool, for several reasons including ensuring the topics are valuable, my style is effective, and that I understand my participants. I look forward to diving into this course. |
AuthorI am passionate about creating experiences of personal growth for adults through self-reflection and connection with others in groups. Archives
March 2018
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