Reification Of Adult Learning Essays Example

Writing on a complex problem like adult learning can itself be a complex process. An adult student’s cultural literacy is formed over a lifetime of experiences with the written word and encompasses their expectations, their goals, and their understanding of their relationship to the broader world. It is no surprise, then, that I faced several challenges as I began to explore this issue and its impact on the educational experience. Being able to explain a complex concept to others requires you to first reach a complete understanding of the topic—no small task in itself, when faced with the complex issues of education. Thorough study and synthesis of my chosen sources allowed me to reach that level of understanding, beyond which I was able to effectively problematize cultural literacy in adult learning.
The purpose of this paper was to explore the idea of how an adult learner’s cultural literacy prevents them from feeling fully integrated into the college classroom, making them less likely to benefit as much as traditional students from the education process. The intended audience of the essay was scholars, educational theorists, and higher education instructors who may need to address this issue in their own classrooms. The purpose and audience of this essay ultimately aligned. Because it was intended for either educational theorists—or the people putting those theories into practice—it spared me from having to explain some of the concepts, which would already be understood by the paper’s readers. This allowed me to stay focused on the ultimate purpose of the essay rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae of educational theories and practices. By understanding my audience as themselves well-read in the subject at hand, I could go beyond the basics of educational theory and develop more complex themes and ideas, with the confidence my reader’s educational background would allow them to follow.
My first task in completing this essay was to demonstrate how an adult learner’s educational experience differed from that of a traditional student and why this ultimately presented a problem. I was surprised to discover that this was the easiest portion of the essay to develop. Outlining the educational process from the traditional student’s perspective allowed me to then demonstrate the adult learner’s experience by showing the places where it differed. Once I had identified the points at which the traditional education system fails the adult learner, it was a matter of showing the impact of cultural literacy—why it’s a problem, and what can be done to change it.
The first and largest challenge that I faced in writing this paper was that of understanding the subject myself effectively enough to synthesize an opinion. Being myself a product of the traditional educational system described so effectively by Theodore Sizer and Paulo Freire, the idea of interacting with these scholarly works and then synthesizing my own argument was initially overwhelming. It helped that the source I chose already felt as though they were in conversation with each other. Following the connections made in that conversation started to give me a broader picture of the issue than that presented in any one reading. Once I understood the complexities of the issue, conveying them on the page proved to also be a challenge. I was at first attempting to explain the issue using general language, referring to traditional students or adult students as the entire group—something of an irony, considering that one point of the sources I synthesized was that there is no effective one-size-fits-all educational model. I saw that Theodore Sizer used a hypothetical example very effectively in his essay, “What High School Is.” By employing this device in my own essay, I attempted to ground the reader, giving them the point of view of a single student. This allowed me to show an instance of cultural literacy in practice, clarifying its impact on the adult learner’s educational experience.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this assignment was the need to both show the complexity of the issue and identify then stay focused on the key points. The very idea of cultural literacy is a complex one, bringing in issues not only of education but also of society and class. In addressing the problems of adult learners in a college classroom, the issue becomes even more complex because it involves comparing the way two groups of individuals approach the idea of education in different ways. This involved not only analysis of the idea of education—both in terms of its practice and its ultimate goals—but also a thoughtful consideration of the values and goals of the students going through the course. In this particular case, then, it was not the complexity that was difficult to develop; the subject is complex enough to warrant analysis. The challenge was isolating which aspects of that complexity were most relevant to the specific problem I was addressing. Ultimately, I achieved this balance of focus and complexity by limiting my scope to one key aspect of students’ cultural literacy: how it informed their ultimate educational goals. By narrowing in on this point, I was able to compare the two disparate groups—adult students and traditional students—without having to address the many details of what makes their experiences so different.
The selection of sources was a benefit to achieving this balance of focus and complexity, because reading and analyzing these sources helped me to see that it was the educational goals of the students that I most wanted to address when problematizing adult learning. I noticed a similarity between the issues brought up in Paulo Freire’s “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” and those addressed in Theodore Sizer’s “What High School Is.” Both presented the traditional system of education as one that fails to address the true complexities of learning. The picture painted by these two sources in tandem is of an assembly-line education. Students are sent through courses in order to be given knowledge by their teachers in much the same way a cell phone might travel down a production line to receive the various components that will make it whole—with the students not expected or encouraged to take an active role in the process any more than the cell phone is. From this point, I turned to Barry Alford’s “Freirean Voices, Student Choices,” which from the very name can be seen to be in conversation with Paulo Freire’s essay and concepts. Both this essay and Jack Mezirow’s “Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice” suggested alternatives to this assembly-line educational process, as Freire also did in his essay. Looking at their theories side by side, the three authors all seemed to be suggesting similar ways to fix the education system: give the students more opportunities for synthesis and engagement. Reading David Barton and Mary Hamilton’s “Literacy Practices” then expanded my view of what the adult student is likely to expect out of their educational experience, allowing me to start articulating what I believed to be the major issue presented by the work of these five scholars.
The experience of researching and problematizing the influence of cultural literacy on adult learning was ultimately beneficial for my own understanding of the educational system. While students may be accustomed to their role as receptacles of knowledge, the research I conducted for this essay shows that does not make it necessarily the best system to promote life-long learning. Shifting to a model that engages the students more encourages more critical thinking and synthesis in the classroom, which is ultimately a benefit to all the students, regardless of their age or past experience.