"The whole movement of life is learning" (Krishnamurti). "To be an act of knowing, then, the adult literacy process must engage the learners in the constant problematizing of their existential situations" (Freire). "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free" (Douglass). "I can learn anything I have the desire to learn" (White, S.G.).

Friday, February 7, 2014

Andragogy and Literacy

I struggled to create a coherent blog post this week.  I tumbled around thoughts about the overlap in our readings this week about group life (of which many of the readings touched upon) and gnawed on those a little bit because my other class this semester is "Learning in Groups and Teams."  I even wrote a blog post for Groups & Teams that was about the overlap I feel between courses.  

Thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that it shows deft program planning and well-chosen articles and texts in support of our coursework, that we should witness so much intentional intellectual overlap.  It means that all of our work in Adult Learning is truly focused on topics relevant to the subject. 
Learners enter into the process of learning not by acquiring facts, but by constructing their reality in social exchange with others. (Wallerstein, p.34)
I recognize that description! That's social constructivist knowledge!  That's what we do in class every day, when we have long discussions about our generative words and listen carefully to one another!  A-ha!

3 comments:

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  2. Dear Caitlin, I am glad the two courses overlap in content, though you may be giving us way too much credit for designing deliberate across-course coherence! Nevertheless, you are dead on target about the social constructivist approach. I hope that you all will be able to construct your own model or concept of reading by the end of the class...But, (as some of learned from Women's Ways of Knowing last semester), this construction is not to be confused with relativism. There's some heavy theory work to be done in our ZPD blog world.

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  3. HA! My blog was about the theoretical overlap too. I think it can be tied back to andragogy and adult learning as a whole, and how certain themes come up again and again. Constructivism is such a huge part of Action Learning, which we use in Capstone as a means to consult and help others. I am realizing the importance of reflection for processing what you have learned and what knowledge you have created. The Bahamian women, for example, did that through writing.

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