The article, “Adult School Phobias” edited by Miller and King informs on experiences of women empowerment through literacy. The article reiterates on women stories of anxiety and the adult education practice to assist them. According to Miller and King most, women experience pain, debilitating emotion, isolation, and pain in their school life. Fear and anxiety is inherent in the course of learning to hinder a person’s thoughts to lead to phobias. Some of the phobias associated with school and learning include fear of ridicule, fear of incompetence, fear of the unknown, and fear of the school environment. Women try to address the phobias using rationalization, destructive defense mechanisms, and suppression. The self-defeating behavior pattern will protect the learner the self-destructive behavior to overcome the situation of fear. To solve the situation of phobias, women have to understand the source of school phobia, accept the feelings, and adopt the coping strategies. According to educators, the recognition of the signs of fear leads to the management of the environment to challenge the present misconceptions and past damage. It is possible for the affected women to continue with their schooling as they look forward to new experiences and new concepts. Sally is a 50 year old reading student who has faced the school environment phobia. Sally joined junior high the same with her sibling and the teachers mistreated her in reference to the brothers and sisters misbehavior. The cold reception from the teachers led to Sally experiencing anxiety since it was just the first day, and she did not know what to expect in the future. The meeting with educators led to Sally having relief from worries in the environment.
The article, “Breaking Free to the Power of Experiential Learning” will affect the development of self-efficacy to the incarcerated female adult learners. Educators and experienced practitioners of experiential learning believe that one achieves learning through reflection as one participates in the event of life. According to Dawn, experiential learning depicts a creative and practical path to knowledge to build on simple discoveries that reveal in the reflective moments. The Alternative Violence Project developed by the Green Haven and the American Society. AVP assumes that one can share and learn from the experiences from others. An assessment and continuous improvement in the exercises will meet specific learner needs that are incarcerated. The incarceration program has a lasting effect that will continue even after the participants leave the site of training. Experiential learning will assist participants to internalize concepts that will lay foundation to other learning experiences. Most of the female prisoners are vulnerable to violence acts and sexual abuse prior to incarceration. The AVP workshops give women the opportunity to use different techniques such as story sharing to test ideas and utilize group feedback with the intention of changing the practices. The Correctional Association of New York state that women encounter sexual abuse before entering the prison. According to statistics, Whites encounter a lower incarceration rate than the African American and the Latino women. Female inmates have histories of sexual abuse than men. Before incarceration, women have low-income or no-income family caregivers. Most of the women come from socially maligned and broken homes prior to entering incarceration.
Self-assessment plays crucial roles to develop self-perception to lead to greater motivation to establish student engagement that will enable them perform better on specific tasks. Self-efficacy engages students to estimate what they can do and the chances of success in the performance. A self-perception develops in a gradual way to connect success and the failure factors that will influence the situation. A positive self-perception is part of self-efficacy that depict general ability or the knowledge where students have high expectation to continue doing well. A positive self-evaluation will encourage students to commit more resources to continue studying as they set high goals in their future life. Students have to evaluate their learning as they adopt a working learning strategy that will assist them in their further work.
References
Kuehnle, K. (2012). Serial offenders: theory and practice. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Merriam, S. B. (2013). Adult learning linking theory and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Taylor, K., Marienau, C., & Fiddler, M. (2000). Developing adult learners: strategies for teachers and trainers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
