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Working in Groups with Adult Literacies Learners Learning Connections

Learning Connections Learning Connections Working in Groups with AdultWorking in Groups with Adult

Literacies LearnersLiteracies Learners

Section 9

Reading and Resources

Section 9: 0 Contents Page 1 of 51


Section 9

Reading and Resources

1. Reading and Resources List

2. Definition of Literacy

3. Scottish Context

4. Principles and Guidelines

5. Summary of Project Paper 1, the Adult Literacies in Scotland Project

6. The Curriculum in Adult Literacy and Numeracy – extract from the Literacies in the Community pack

7. Listening to Learners , Juliet Merrifield, (extract)

8. Dedicated and Integrated Provision for Adult Literacies Learners – some examples from the field

9. Small Groups in Adult Literacy and Basic Education , ERIC Digest 130, Susan Imel

10. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Brookfield, S (extract)

11. Critical Literacy for Adult Literacy in Language Learners, ERIC Digest. Van Duzer & Cunningham

12. Through the Lens of Learning: How the Visceral Experience of Learning Reframes Teaching; in Using Experience for Learning, Boud, D, Cohen, R & Walker, D, 1993


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NotesThis section includes material which will be of interest to both trainers and participants. Some pieces are referred to in other sections as handouts for particular activities. It is expected that trainers will select a small amount of appropriate reading for their participants. They may wish to offer some additional material as optional background reading.

Principles and Guidelines, (4), is a Powerpoint presentation. The version included here is the handout but the presentation is included on the CD-ROM and can be adapted to include local information. It covers some of the key points from the Literacies in the Communities pack and could be a useful starting point for a discussion on how these principles and guidelines inform the way that tutors approach their work with adult literacies learners.

Some of the material in the ITALL pack could also be usefully used as part of a group work training, for example 1.H5, The community education approach to adult literacies, or, 3.OHP2, The seven principles.


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Reading and Resources List

Many of the books listed are in the resource collections of Learning Connections, Communities Scotland. You can arrange a visit to the Edinburgh, Paisley or Aberdeen base by contacting Karen Geekie, 0131 479 5494, [email protected] Website at http://www.lc.communitiesscotland.gov.uk

Most of the books can be ordered from the Avanti Catalogue, http://www.avantibooks.com This catalogue has the most comprehensive list of books relevant to adult literacy and numeracy.

Scottish Executive publications are available from the Stationery Office Bookshop or from the website, http://www.scotland.gov.uk

The Literacies in the Community pack is available from Learning Connections. Contact Louise Peoples, 0131 479 5424, [email protected]

The Introductory Training in Adult Literacies Learning (ITALL) has been distributed to members of the local Literacies Partnerships. The partnerships will be notified when a revised version is available.

TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHERLiteracies in the Community :Resources for Practitioners and Managers

National Development Project – Adult Literacies in Scotland

City of Edinburgh Council 2000

Listening to Learners: Consultation with Learners about Adult Literacy Education in Scotland

Merrifield, Juliet, The Learning from Experience Trust

Scottish Executive2001

Adult Literacy and Numeracy in Scotland, report

Adult Literacy Team Scottish Executive 2001

Introductory Training in Adult Literacies Learning (ITALL)

National Training Project for Adult Literacies

Communities Scotland2002

Further Guidance for Partnerships on: 1) Making appropriate use of new funding

A summary of presentation to CEMS Literacies sub-group by HMI Jerry Cairns

HMIE and ELLD January 2003Sent to the Literacies Partnerships

New Practice, Good Practice:the role of reflection in adult

Ann Finlay with Moira Hamilton and Fiona Macdonald

Scottish Executive, Communities Scotland


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mailto:[email protected]

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/

http://www.avantibooks.com/

http://www.lc.communitiesscotland.gov.uk/

mailto:[email protected]


literacies tutor training 2003

Literacy An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language

Barton, D Blackwell, 1994

Situated Literacies Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic

Routledge, 2000

Adults Count Too: Mathematics for Empowerment

Benn, Roseanne NIACE, 1997

Teacher as LearnerA Sourcebook for Participatory Staff DevelopmentSeeds of Innovation Series

Bingham, B & Bell, B Centre for Literacy Studies, University of Tennessee, 1995

Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher

Brookfield, Stephen , D Jossey-Bass, 1995

Developing Critical Thinkers

Brookfield, Stephen D. Open University Press, 1987

Powerful Literacies Crowther, J, Hamilton, M & Tett, L editors

NIACE, 2991

Assessment Matters in Adult Learning

Donley, J & Naper, R NIACE, the National Organisation for Adult Learning, 1999

Learning TogetherA Small Group Literacy Tutor Trainer Handbook

Fretz. B & Paul, M Core Literacy, Ontario, Canada, 1994

Reflecting on Literacy in Education

Hannon, Peter Routledge

The Literacy Dictionary Harris, T & Hodges, R International Reading Association, 1995

Learning in Groups Jaques, David Kogan Page, third edition 2000

Learning to Learn McCormack, R and Pancini, G

Division of Further Education, Victoria, Australia, revised edition, 1991

A Question of Value Achievement and Progression in Adult Learning

McGivney, Veronica NIACE, 2002

Learning in Practice National Adult Literacy Agency

NALA, Eire, 1996

Adults Learning Rogers, Jenny Open University Press 2001

How to Teach Adults 1,2 & 3 Teaching and

Various USWE and JUTA, South Africa, 1997


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Learning Series

Introducing the Course in Applied Vocational Study Skills

Video CAVSS Western Australian Department of Education and Training, 2003

Teaching basic Literacy to ESOL learners –

Videos 1 & 2 London Language and Literacy Unit

London Language and Literacy Unit

Taking the Chance Video –used in ITALL Falkirk Community Council Services

Lines in the Dust – Reflect approach

Video Karpus/Action Aid 2001

The ERIC digests included in Section 9 can be downloaded fromhttp://askeric.org

The Learning Skills questionnaire from the ARKS pack, used in Section 6: 6 can be downloaded from http://www.2ctl.org.uk/arks/index

The website for the Reflect approach is:http://www.reflect-action.org/http://www.reflect-action.org


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http://www.reflect-action.org/http://www.reflect-action.org

http://www.2ctl.org.uk/arks/index

http://askeric.org/


Definition of Literacy

The ability to read, write and use numeracy, to handle information, to express ideas and opinions, to make decisions and solve problems, as family members, workers, citizens and lifelong learners.

Adult Literacy and Numeracy in Scotland, Report 2001, Page 7


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The Scottish Context

In 1998 the Scottish Executive commissioned a survey of the scale and nature of literacy and numeracy provision throughout Scotland. This was called the Adult Literacies in Scotland project.

Its first project paper, Literacy and Community Education, discussed different definitions of literacy and the different models of provision. It advocated a community education approach that recognised adults as lifelong learners whose uses of literacy would change and develop throughout their lives, and defined literacy not as something you have or you don’t have when you leave school, but as involving skills, knowledge and understanding that you build on throughout your life to meet new needs.

The second project paper, Adult Literacy and Numeracy, a survey of programmes in local authorities and further education, noted the concerns that providers had, and the difficulties they were experiencing in meeting the literacy and numeracy needs of a diverse range of learners. It identified the gap between the amount of provision available and the number of potential learners who could benefit from help with literacy and numeracy.

The final publication from the project was Literacies in the Community: resources for practitioners and managers which set out the principles on which a community education approach was based and provided guidelines on good practice for literacy and numeracy practitioners. These principles and guidelines underpin this training.

The Executive continued its Adult Literacy initiative by setting up the Literacy 2000 team. The team commissioned various pieces of research including Listening to learners: consultation about adult literacy education in Scotland, Juliet Merrifield, Scottish Executive. This research informed the report, Adult Literacies and Numeracy in Scotland, published in 2001.

The Scottish Executive committed £22.5 million to reach 80,000 people between 2001 and 2004 with the aim of improving and increasing the provision for adult literacy learners. The money was allocated to cross-sectoral partnerships in each region of Scotland and these have produced action plans with proposals for implementing the report’s recommendations in their areas. The funding period has since been extended to 2006, the funding increased to £51 million and the target increased to 150,000.



The report recognised the importance of improving literacy and numeracy levels and linked this to three government priorities – lifelong learning, social inclusion and active citizenship. Its key principles included a commitment to a lifelong learning approach and targeting priority groups. One of the factors it identified as being critical to success was developing learner-centred programmes.

Other recommendations in the report included a national training strategy, national standards for staff and awareness raising to improve the identification of need within communities.

Some of this work had already been started by the National Training Project which began work in January 2001. It carried out a training needs analysis, started development of a training framework for literacy and numeracy practitioners, and provided some immediate training. Its work also included developing and piloting the Introductory Training in Adult Literacies Learning pack.

A further recommendation in the report was the creation of a national development engine to support the work of the cross-sectoral partnerships. This has now been established as part of Learning Connections within the Regeneration Division of Communities Scotland. Learning Connections is led by Lillias Noble and has bases in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Paisley.

Its tasks include raising awareness of literacy issues, developing accredited training for literacies practitioners in Scotland, using pathfinder projects to encourage innovative practice in reaching learners in the priority groups and supporting the work of the literacies partnerships throughout Scotland.

Training at the first level of the training framework has now been validated as three SQA units at SCQF level six. This provides an accredited introductory training for tutor assistants. Accredited training for group tutors, which will be at a higher level, is the next priority.

This pack of materials is not an accredited course but a response to requests from the field for some immediate support in training tutors in group work for literacies learners.


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Principles and guidance

1

Adult Literacy and NumeracyPartnerships

increase and improve the provision f or adult literacy and numeracylearners

2Definition of Literacy

The ability to read, write and use numeracy, to handle information, to express ideas and opinions, to make decisions and solve problems, as f amily members, workers, citizens and lif elong learners.

Adult Literacy and Numeracy in Scotland, Page 7, Report 2001

3

Guiding Principles

promoting self -determination developing an understanding of

literacies recognising and respecting diff erence

and diversity promoting participation developing equitable and anti-

discriminatory practice developing inf ormed practice drawing on partnerships 4

Promoting self- determination

using material chosen by the learner working on real lif e uses of literacy listening to the learner encouraging learners to be critical

learners


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5

Developing an Understanding of Literacies

helping the learner to recognise the choices that are made in using literacy f or diff erent purposes and diff erent audiences

encouraging the learner to become a critical user of literacies

acknowledging that uses of literacy are changing

6 Recognising and Respecting Diff erence and Diversity

valuing the learner’s existing uses of literacy

working on real lif e uses of literacy that are meaningful f or the many diff erent groups within society



7

Guideline for the Curriculum learning options are flexible and

responsive to diverse needs and aspirations

knowledge, skills and understanding are developed in context

learning is presented as a positive and enjoyable experience

lif elong learning is promoted 8

Guideline for Learning and Teaching

approaches are relevant to learners’ chosen contexts and goals

preferred learning styles are identified and respected

interaction and dialogue between learners is actively promoted and purposeful

9

Guideline for Resources

resources, including accommodation and equipment promote a positive image of literacy and numeracy learning

self -directed learning is encouraged and supported

the allocation and use of resources is equitable and inclusive.



Summary

‘Literacy’ and ‘being literate’ are not stable definitions but concepts that constantly change in tandem with changes in language, technologies and social organisation.

Although literacy is often thought of as a skill or set of skills, literacy involves a range of capabilities involving knowledge, skills and understanding.

The literacies learned in school do not simply transfer to adult life. Schools lay the foundations but they are unable to encompass or anticipate all future uses of literacy.

Adults learn new literacies in the workplace, home and local community. These new contexts provide learning opportunities via apprenticeship, networks of support, access to resources and contact with new literacy modes and codes as these develop.

People who are excluded from full participation in social, economic, political and cultural life do not share the same opportunities for adult literacy learning.

The most excluded are caught in a mutually reinforcing cycle where their lack of opportunities limits the demands made on their literacy, which in turn limits both their capabilities and their confidence as literacy learners.

Community education approaches to adult literacy should combine courses and projects with carrying out research, enhancing networks of support, creating access to resources and giving advice to external agencies.

The combination of adult learning opportunities and indirect support can break into and ameliorate the effects of the damaging cycle that prevents the most excluded adults from developing their literacies.

Envisaging a full range of community education approaches to adult literacy learning is an important step in realising community education’s potential as an agent for change.


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From Project Paper 1, Literacy and Community Education, Adult Literacies in Scotland, 1999


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from the Literacies in the Community pack, Guide to Tutoring and Guidance, P17 – 20 City of Edinburgh Council, 2000


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Pre-session reading or background reading– Role of The Tutor,

Section 5:1

Listening to Learners: Consultation with Learners about Adult Literacy Education in Scotland, by Juliet Merrifield

5 Support and guidance Given the level of fear and nervousness that accompanies enrolling in a literacy and numeracy class, what makes learners feel included? Where do they get the support needed? Two main factors emerge from the focus group discussions: the tutor's role in making learners feel comfortable and at ease, and the role of other learners in the class.

a) Tutor's role Learners in most of the kinds of programmes talked about how important their tutor was in making them feel at ease in a difficult situation. They recognise that having the right person as tutor is crucial. One learner in an FE college contrasted the progress she was making in subjects she had taken at school but never enjoyed then: 'It's the tutors. They are really, really helpful and they're so friendly and they never treat you the way a teacher would. They treat you as a human being and if you need help they'll take the time to try and help you.' [Lothian, Other Adult Learner] There are several characteristics that learners used to describe good tutors:

Friendly and welcoming - making the class feel like 'one big family', breaking the ice and getting people talking to one another

Reassuring - understanding the fears and concerns of adult learner, and assuring them that they will be able to manage the work. 'I listened quite carefully to the things that you were saying and I knew by the end of it you would never put anybody in a spot, you would just let people take their time about anything.' [Glasgow, Other Adult Learner]

Treating everyone as an individual - helping them find things they want to work on, finding the right level for them (not too difficult but not too easy)

Patient and non-judgemental

Leading without dominating

Above all, treating people as 'adults, not weans' [Glasgow, Other Adult Learner].

One focus group teased apart the elements in good tutoring in this exchange: 'I've heard of people going to courses and they've walked in the door and they've taken one look at the tutor and gone, oh no. It does happen, we were really lucky. [Tutor]'s style of tutoring is good and she's got a good sense of humour.'

'Yes, I think a tutor has a lot to do with whether you enjoy the course or not.'

'She was very informal but we got done what we were supposed to do, but in a nice way.'

'That's quite a hard thing to do, to be the tutor without taking a head role, to actually integrate yourself in with the students.'


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'Instead of saying you will do this, you will do it that way, as a teacher.'

'[Tutor] kept control of the situation, actually led you to where you were supposed to be without being dominant.' [Highlands, Other Adult Learners]

b) Other learners' roles The tutor may set the tone for the class, but other learners are also crucial to the sense of comfort that keeps learners there. One group talked about a woman who had been in their class but left because she felt others were laughing at her (even though they said they weren't). In several of the groups, learners talked about helping each other and working together. Other learners in the group have an important role in helping new members feel welcome and at home -in creating a sense of 'family' or making new friends. 'I look forward to coming here, it's a social event as well as an educational event.' [Fife, ALN Learner] This may be especially important for people who don't have a large family or circle of friends outside. 'I thought I wouldn't be able to do it when I got into my 60s, but it's easier now. I meet more friends instead of staying at home and doing housework all the time and taking the dog for a walk.' [Fife, ALN Learner] The sense that everyone is in the same boat makes it easier for ALN learners, as well as for those who are going back to learning after many years away from it. 'You feel that everyone's here for the same reason as you, so you don't feel put down.' [Lothian, ALN Learner] However, a few learners talked about experiences they had had in earlier classes that were not as positive, where they didn't feel that they could fit into the group as well.

Dedicated and Integrated


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Adult Literacy and Numeracy Provision

Dedicated provisionThis is provision that focuses exclusively and explicitly on literacy or numeracy learning goals.

Learners and tutors negotiate the learning programme; learners have individual learning plans and record and evaluate using students' progress files.

Examples of dedicated provision Community Education roll-on-roll-off groups or study clubs in

'Everyday English' or 'Everyday Maths' where the learners discuss and agree individual and group learning goals with the tutor to enable them to gain skills, knowledge and understanding in reading, writing and numeracy.

Short courses for learners such as'Improve your reading' For learners who want help with reading or who want to read things for themselves that other people read for them.Introduction to numeracy For learners who want to brush up on number work, for example, help children with homework, improve skills for employment, prepare to go to college, or just feel more confident with maths.*

Other modes of provision might include drop-in, short term one to one support or certificated courses.

*From course publicity

Integrated ProvisionThe literacy/numeracy learning is explicit and complementary to the other learning.

The terms integrated, applied and embedded have been used interchangeably and we recommend that only the term integrated should be used to prevent confusion.

Provision incorporates learning about aspects of literacy or numeracy as part of another subject area or learning activity.

This could include stand-alone provision, or courses that are linked to the wider programme of dedicated provision.

Learners have individual learning plans that reflect and record literacy/ numeracy learning goals and outcomes. Sometimes this includes use of students' progress files.


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The literacy/numeracy component of any course is explicit to all learners. This is reflected in how the course is marketed and publicised and how initial guidance is undertaken.

In courses where literacy/numeracy is offered to all participants as options from a menu, those learners opting-in should be counted as 'integrated' learners.

Examples of integrated provision:

Driving Theory Course A 6-week course, for young people aged 17-25, about driving theory with support for reading and understanding the test language.

Democracy Disability and Society A group that aims to raise awareness about disability as a civil rights issue and achieve positive changes. The work of the group includes undertaking a range of reading and writing activities.Tutors working with the group offer support and help participants to develop written communication.

English and Computers A short course for learners already attending literacy provision, who wanted to learn more about the reading and writing activities involved in using e-mail and the Internet as well as getting more confident about using computers.

Money and Supermarket Shopping Course A course for learners with learning disabilities meeting in a library and including regular visits to a supermarket. The course covers shopping and money in a relevant, real life setting.

Family Learning Groups Groups for parents and carers of children aged 3-6. The group members look at how children learn, brush up on their own learning, learn new skills, see what goes on in schools, and discuss learning at home and in school.

Core Skills/Communication Integrating learning and teaching about core skills with work in other subject areas such as Sociology.For example, addressing the following areas of learning:

Reading- Ability to read and understand the main information in texts- Identifying the purpose and angle of texts- Forming a critical appraisal of texts and ability to

express opinions on them


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Writing- Planning work - helping learners develop the skills

of planning their work so that it has main information, structure, coherence

- Writing English which is basically grammatically correct:Punctuation, syntax, paragraph structure, apostrophes etc.

- Following written conventions e.g. of essay writing, reports, letters or email

Speaking- Planning presentations and presenting information clearly in a

logical order- Delivering presentations - spoken not read, eye contact,

fluency etc.

Information- Identifying and using appropriate resources- Using the Internet to find and use information- Using subject textbooks and newspapers to find

information

Skillstart Engineering (FE College)Special programmes and vocational staff combine in team teaching and curriculum development. Basic engineering skills are imparted along with Skillstart communication at access levels and basic skills in numeracy and personal organisation.

The course can lead to a Skillstart group award; it caters mainly for full time Extension Course students, but is also in-filled by other students, foe example with hearing and learning difficulties.

Options and Choices 'Gateway' (FE College)This is aimed at students who have difficulties in progressing on to mainstream provision and/or are undecided. Often these students have difficulties in literacy. They can join a small group which follows an IT based programme involving team teaching - a basic skills specialist working with an IT specialist. Communication and numeracy are integrated with IT skills and preparation for progression e.g. letters, CVs, consulting information and data.

Other Definitions

Learning Support


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Also called 'study support' in some sectors, offers additional literacy/numeracy support to learners on other subject courses. This support may be offered as a freestanding optional course or as a drop-in, workshop or study club type of provision.

Curriculum Support in Literacy/Numeracy This is where learning and teaching methods and approaches in other subject areas are adapted to accommodate literacy/numeracy learners. For example, simplification of written materials or handouts.

Curriculum support in literacy/numeracy could be part of integrated provision, if supported by explicit tuition in literacy/numeracy.

ERIC NO: ED350490


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TITLE: Small Groups in Adult Literacy and Basic Education. ERIC Digest No. 130. AUTHOR: Imel, Susan PUBLICATION DATE: 1992 Traditionally, a one-on-one, individualized approach to instruction has predominated in adult literacy and basic education (Bingham et al. 1990; Roskos 1990). According to Ennis (1990), this approach has been supported by the assumption that "confidentiality was a treasured principle...and [it] implicitly helped sustain the notion that literacy is a private matter, a process of individuals developing skills for their own personal use" (p. 105). Recently, the use of groups has been advocated as an effective approach for delivering adult literacy and basic education. Although support for the use of the small group approach is expanding, little empirical evidence exists documenting its effectiveness. However, a growing body of practice-based literature chronicles the experiences of adult literacy and basic education programs that have used the small group approach.This ERIC DIGEST examines the emergence of the small group approach. First, the rationale underlying the use of groups, including their advantages and disadvantages, is explored. Next, the characteristics of effective groups are discussed and some implementation considerations are raised. The DIGEST concludes with a list of resources that can be consulted for additional information. WHY USE SMALL GROUPS? A number of factors have converged to stimulate the use of small groups in adult literacy and basic education. A desire to provide a learning environment that is more learner centered and collaborative has been a major catalyst for the use of small groups. Advocates of this approach also suggest that small groups more accurately reflect the contexts in which adults generally use literacy skills. Use of this approach acknowledges that literacy is a social process (Bingham et al. 1990; Ennis 1990). Another set of factors promoting the use of small groups is related to the increased use of language experience or whole language as instructional approaches in adult literacy and basic education. Because these approaches use both written and oral language for "personally meaningful purposes while learning through active processes in the social community of the classroom," they use small groups to incorporate personal experiences into adult literacy development (Roskos 1990, p. 6). Most proponents of the small group approach do not suggest that it supplant other approaches; rather they suggest that it be used in combination with one-on-one and/or large group instruction (Bingham et al. 1990; Ennis and Davison 1989; Gaber-Katz and



Watson 1990). They also acknowledge that the use of small groups has both advantages and disadvantages. ADVANTAGES Major advantages of the small group approach, synthesized from a number of sources (Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit 1982; Bingham et al. 1990; Cheatham and Lawson 1990; Ennis 1990; Ennis and Davison 1989; Gaber-Katz and Watson 1990), include the following: --It allows for integration of critical thinking and other language processes. Talking, listening, writing, and reading can be interrelated, and the spoken word can interact with the written word. --By creating opportunities for learners to experience and observe the learning of others, it permits them to expand their repertoire of learning strategies. --It breaks down the isolation and stigma frequently experienced by adults with insufficient literacy skills and provides peer support for their learning. --It enhances learners' self-esteem by helping them understand that they have much to offer as a result of their experiences. --Through the collective expertise of the group members, it makes available a wide range of resources, including the thinking, experience, help, and encouragement of other group members. --It eases the distinction between teachers/tutors and learners by creating a cooperative, participative environment that is less hierarchical than environments produced by traditional approaches. DISADVANTAGES Major disadvantages of the small group approach, synthesized from several sources (Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit 1982; Bingham et al. 1990; Gaber-Katz and Watson 1990; and Ottoson et al. 1985), include the following: --Accommodating a wide range of needs and abilities is difficult in a small group. Learners may not only have conflicting goals but also different rates of learning. --The needs of individuals in a group have to be reconciled with the needs of the group as a whole and thus tension may arise between learner-centeredness and a group-centered or collective approach. --Negotiating a learner-centered curriculum in a group can be very hard work. --Compared to one-on-one tutoring, a small group requires more preparation time. Ottoson et al. (1985) suggest it may double preparation time. --Some learners are simply not comfortable with the idea of group participation. --In addition to teaching skills, tutors/teachers also need group leadership skills for the group to be successful.


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WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE GROUPS? Simply meeting in a small group does not constitute an effective learning environment. Cheatham and Lawson (1990) suggest that adult literacy and basic education small groups often fall into one of four categories: dysfunctional (no participation from members); leaderless (no exchange of ideas); on-task (willing to talk and listen but no sharing of meaningful information); and functioning (on-task and involved). The ideal is functioning because there is a sense of trust and an expectation that learning will occur. Most groups go through several stages, however, before they meet the definition of a functioning group. According to Bingham et al. (1990) effective groups are: --small in size, ranging from 5 to 15 learners; --learner centered, in that they seek to adapt the curriculum to the needs and interests of learners; --experiential, in that they seek to incorporate learners' experiences, skills, and ideas in the teaching; --cooperative, in that learners commonly help each other and work together; and --participatory, in that learners have a say in what is taught and how it is taught, rather than being passive recipients (p. 2). In addition, the role of the teacher/tutor is that of a facilitator of learning and leader rather than that of a person conveying information (ibid.). WHAT ARE SOME IMPLEMENTATION CONSIDERATIONS? Among the many areas that need to be considered when implementing the small group approach, the most important are selecting and training leaders, assigning learners to groups, choosing materials, and assessing learner progress. Not every teacher/tutor may possess the characteristics or skills necessary to be an effective group leader. Facilitating a small group requires a willingness to adjust one's leadership style to the developmental stages of the group. For example, the early stages of a group's life may demand a more directive style, whereas in later stages a more participative style would be appropriate (Ottoson 1985). Initial training and ongoing staff development should be available to support teachers/tutors in assuming new roles (Roskos 1990). Making appropriate group assignments for learners is another consideration. Both situational barriers, such as time and location, and psychosocial barriers, such as resistance to the idea of participating in a small group, have to be addressed. One program successfully used a monthly orientation session to introduce learners to the small group approach (Bingham et al. 1990).



Use of the small group approach will likely require a greater variety of instructional materials. Because of small groups' learner-centered approach, published curricula may not fit learner interests. For example, in Eastern Tennessee, programs use a substantial amount of teacher-prepared materials that have been developed from learners' interests in conjunction with published materials (ibid.). Although assessment of individuals may be required for both diagnosis and evaluation, those implementing the small group approach may wish to develop additional, alternative forms of assessing learners' progress. Programs in Eastern Tennessee use a variety of alternative methods of assessment, including sustained silent reading in which the learner keeps track of rate of speed; a portfolio of writing that permits the student to see progress; and student-developed checklists, charts, or graphs for plotting successful uses of literacy (ibid.). WHAT ARE SOME RESOURCES FOR FURTHER INFORMATION? All of the references listed here will provide additional information about the small group approach. Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (1982), Cheatham and Lawson (1990), and Ottoson et al. (1985) contain guidelines for implementing small groups. Bingham et al. (1990) is based on first-hand accounts of the experiences of both leaders and learners in the small group approach. In addition to general information about the small group approach, Ennis and Davison (1989) contains reports of a variety of small groups that were implemented in Australia. These descriptions contain examples of instructional materials. The Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council (1991) report describes the use of the small group approach in math instruction. Although the research studies by Gaber-Katz and Watson (1990) and Roskos (1990) are not specifically about the small group approach, both contain information that supports the method. REFERENCES Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit. TEACHING GROUPS. A BASIC EDUCATION HANDBOOK. London, England: ALBSU, January 1982. (ED 281 058). Bingham, M. B.; Merrifield, J.; White, C.; and White, L. A TEACHER IN A DIFFERENT WAY: GROUP LITERACY INSTRUCTION IN TENNESSEE. Knoxville: Center for Literacy Studies, The University of Tennessee, 1990. Cheatham, J., and Lawson, V. K. SMALL GROUP TUTORING. A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH FOR LITERACY INSTRUCTION. Syracuse, NY: Literacy Volunteers of America, 1990. (ED 319 918). Ennis, R. "Learning in Small Adult Literacy Groups." AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ADULT AND COMMUNITY EDUCATION 30, no. 2 (July 1990): 105-110.


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Ennis, R., and Davison, D. A LIFE OF ITS OWN. ADULT LITERACY WORK IN A SMALL GROUP. Melbourne, Australia: Workplace Basic Education Project, Council of Adult Education, [1989]. (ED 330 847). Gaber-Katz, E., and Watson, G. M. THE LAND THAT WE DREAM OF.... A PARTICIPATORY STUDY OF COMMUNITY-BASED LITERACY. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1990. Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council. A STUDENT-CENTERED APPROACH TO ADULT LITERACY IN ALLEGHENY COUNTY: ADOPTION OF A NATIONALLY-RECOGNIZED MODEL SMALL GROUP INSTRUCTION IN MATH. FINAL REPORT. Pittsburgh, PA: GPLC, 1991. (ED 342 903). Ottoson, G., and others. TUTORING SMALL GROUPS: BASIC READING. Syracuse, NY: Literacy Volunteers of America, 1985. (ED 292 945). Roskos, K. A NATURALISTIC STUDY OF THE ECOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WHOLE LANGUAGE AND TRADITIONAL INDIVIDUALIZED LITERACY INSTRUCTION IN ABE SETTINGS. University Heights, OH: John Carroll University, 1990. (ED 329 769).

Developed with funding from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, under Contract No. RI88062005. The opinions expressed do notnecessarily reflect the opinions or policies of OERI or the Department. DIGESTS may be freely reproduced.

Taken from Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Brookfield S (Jossey-Bass, 1995), pp 228-235. Used with permission.

Negotiating the Risks of Critical Reflection

Stephen Brookfield

One of the risks in writing a book that attempts to demystify the critically reflective process is that of making it seem too straightforward. “All I need to do,” a reader might conclude, “is review my autobiography, research my students, talk to my peers, and read some provocative theoretical literature, and then everything will fall into place. Hey presto! At a stroke, I will become a living exemplar of critical reflection, whose modelling inspires colleagues to scrutinize their assumptions.” But becoming critically reflective is hard work – a long, incremental haul. In the struggle to do this, teachers run political and professional risks and face the exorcism of personal demons. In this chapter, I want to clarify these risks and suggest some ways by which teachers can keep them to a minimum. There is little point in taking the critically reflective journey if along the way we are battered and bruised beyond recognition.

Realizing that our teaching actions might be grounded in uncritically assimilated and unchecked assumptions that turn out to be distorted or



oppressive is sometimes humiliating, always humbling. Going public with stories about critical moments in our practice – especially if these highlight poor judgements and missed opportunities on our part – can damage our reputation to the point where our continued employment is in jeopardy. After all, who wants to hire people known mostly for their mistakes? Asking awkward questions about the nature of power and control sometimes means calling powerful people to account for their ideas and actions. This inevitably brings the questioner face to face with a power structure whose representatives and beneficiaries are often eager to quell dissension and discourage divergent thinking.

In some societies, asking critical questions will lead to your being tortured and killed as an example to others. In colleges, becoming known as a raiser of awkward questions can gain you a reputation as a troublemaking subversive who refuses to play by the rules that everyone else accepts. To keep the risks of critical reflection manageable, we need to know what we’re going to experience as we engage in this process. Being aware of the risks we’re taking helps us negotiate them. It also increases the chances that our actions will have the effects we’re intending while the threat to ourselves is kept to a minimum.

Four risks seem to be particularly common. First, we risk being revealed as the impostors that we think we really are. Second, we risk exclusion from the networks and communities that support us. Third, we endure a grieving for lost certainties, and fourth, we are left in a terrifying state of limbo. I want to examine each of these in turn.

The Impostor Syndrome

Teachers often feel like impostors. They feel that they don’t really deserve to be taken seriously as competent professionals because they’re aware that they don’t really know what they are doing. All they’re certain of is that unless they’re very careful, they will be found out to be teaching under false pretences. In their study of the social realities of teaching, Lieberman and Miller (1991) note that among teachers, “there is a general lack of confidence, a pervasive feeling of vulnerability, a fear of being ‘found out’. Such feelings are made worse because of the privacy ethic. There is no safe place to air one’s uncertainties and to get the kind of feedback necessary to reduce the anxiety about being a good teacher, or at least an adequate one” (p.103). Elbaz (1987) notes that teachers who feel like impostors have a destructive tendency to accept all the blame for failure in a particular situation. Sometimes teachers’ feelings of impostorship are communicated to students, inducing in them an unnecessary anxiety and level of mistrust or doubt. For example, Brems, Baldwin, Davis, and Namyniuk (1994) reported that teachers without self-reported feelings of impostorship were viewed more favourably by students.

Teachers afflicted with the impostor syndrome have the conviction that they don’t really merit any professional recognition or acclaim that comes their way. Dr Vries (1993) summarizes their feelings as follows: “These people


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have an abiding feeling that they have fooled everyone and are not as competent and intelligent as others think they are. They attribute their success to good luck, compensatory hard work, or superficial factors such as physical attractiveness and likeability. Some are incredibly hardworking, always over-prepared. However, they are unable to accept that they have intellectual gifts and ability. They live in constant fear that their imposturous existence will be exposed – that they will not be able to measure up to others’ expectations and that catastrophe will follow”. (p.129).

The presentation of the false face that impostorship entails is usually done for reasons of survival. We believe that if we look as though we don’t know what we’re doing, our students, colleagues, and administrative superiors will eat us alive. We think that admitting frailty will be interpreted as a sign of failure. As Clark (1992) comments, “Asking for help makes us feel vulnerable – vulnerable to being discovered as impostors who don’t know as much as we pretend to know” (p.82). After all, we understand that colleges don’t generally reward those who appear unable to control what’s going on in their classes. How many “Teacher of the Year” awards go to teachers who admit to struggling – sometimes unsuccessfully – to make sense of, and respond to, the chaos they encounter in their practice?

Impostorship means that many of us go through our teaching lives fearing that at some unspecified point in the future, we will undergo a humiliating public unveiling. We wear an external mask of control, but beneath it we know we are frail figures, struggling to make it through to the end of each day. There is the sense that around the corner is an unforeseen but cataclysmic event that will reveal us as frauds. When this event happens, we imagine that our colleagues’ jaws will drop in unison. With their collective mouths agape, they will wonder out loud, “How could we possibly have been so stupid as to hire this obvious incompetent in the first place?” We anticipate the pedagogic equivalent of a military court-martial, in which our epaulets of rank are ceremoniously and publicly ripped from our shoulders. Perhaps our mortarboards or diplomas will be taken away. Or, horror of horrors, our overheads will be removed, never to return.

Viewing our practice through any of the four lenses of critical reflection heightens considerably the changes of our feeling like impostors. We may feel that deliberately focusing on our autobiography will serve only to reveal the full extent of our idiocy. Asking our students what they think of us carries with it the risk that they will tell us what we already know, but have hidden – that we’re incompetent. Anyone who reacts to students’ evaluations of their teaching by ascribing great significance to negative comments and discounting positive ratings is displaying a sense of impostorship. For example, if ninety-eight out of one hundred students give me terrific evaluations, I usually infer that the people who praised me are operating at a lower level of critical discrimination and insight than the two who said I stank. I decide that these two have caught my pedagogical soul. They’ve seen through my façade and realized that I don’t really know what I’m doing.


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For anyone who is desperately trying to avoid being found out the last thing they want is to endure is a systematic scrutiny of their practice by colleagues. There is always the fear that once their impostorship has been discovered, they will be punished. So one of the most important aids to critical reflection – having one’s practice observed by peers - is also one of the most common triggers to feelings of impostorship. The following comment made by a member of a faculty reflection group I was leading is typical:

In my first year here, the dean asked me if she could sit in one of my sessions because I was teaching a topic she was interested in, and she said she thought she could learn something from watching how I taught it. When she asked, I felt my stomach drop into my shoes. But I put on what I hoped was a welcoming, confident smile and said – through gritted teeth – “Of course, that would be wonderful. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more from you than you will from me”. I knew I was supposed to welcome external observation and constructive criticism, even if inside I was terrified at what she’d find out.

Anyway, the afternoon came and I realise now that I spent the whole session trying to prove to her that I knew what I was doing, that it was worth her while having hired me. My students – who I knew pretty well by this time – came up to me afterwards and said, “What on earth were you doing? You were so different from your usual self today. You hardly looked at us, and you seemed more rigid than usual.” If I could have seen myself on camera that day, I’ll bet it would show that I directed the bulk of my comments and eye contact to the dean. I was so concerned that she’d think she’d made a mistake in hiring me that I spent the entire time trying to impress her with how much I knew and how good I was. I was performing for a visitor rather than teaching. I guess my whole focus shifted from helping my students learn to showing that dean how great I was and what a good decision she’d made to hire me.

Reading theoretical literature as part of a critically reflective effort can also have the effect of convincing us that we’re not very bright or sophisticated. If we don’t “get” a theoretical analysis immediately, we conclude that it’s not for the likes of us journeyman practitioners. Simon (1992) writes that when his graduate students (who are mostly working teachers) read theoretical literature, it often induces in them feelings of impostorship. The student decides “that one does not belong in this class; that one does not belong it the graduate school; that one is not as smart as others think; that one is not really an ‘intellectual’; that one is not as well read as one should be” (p.85).

Feelings of impostorship also accompany most attempts at pedagogic experimentation that spring from our reflection. Any time we depart from comfortable ways of acting or thinking to experiment with a new way of teaching, we are almost bound to be taken by surprise. The further we travel from our habitual practices, the more we run the risk of looking incompetent. Teachers who leave the classroom to become administrators, staff developers, mentors or educational leaders invariably report feeling a keen sense of impostorship. Similarly, teachers who are asked to teach a new curriculum, or to substitute for a colleague on sabbatical, know that in so doing they’re bound to make mistakes.


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The moments of failure that inevitably accompany change and experimentation increase the sense of impostorship by emphasizing how little we can predict and control the consequences of our actions. In the midst of experimentation, it is not uncommon for teachers to resolve never again to put themselves through the experience of looking foolish in front of students and trying desperately to conceal the fact that they don’t really know what they are doing. An extract from my own diary gives an example of this.

Today, I had one of those humiliating moments as a teacher that can actually make you squirm with embarrassment for years afterwards as you remember them. I’d come back from the workshop on active learning last semester determined to try out more games and simulations with my students, and today was the first chance I’d had to do this. I’d prepared a 3-hour simulation that required them to form teams, make choices, play roles and consider consequences of educational behaviour. I’d budgeted 15-20 minutes for trouble-shooting, one hour for the simulation to play itself out, and 40 minutes debriefing. Instead, after about half an hour, the teams started drifting back into the room saying, “Ok, we’re finished, what’s next?” So instead of [the anticipated] 40 minutes or so on debriefing, I faced 70 minutes of “dead air”. So I did what I often do in such embarrassing situations and casually pretended that I’d anticipated just such an eventuality and that the simulation I’d designed was so rich in multiple meanings that we needed over an hour to make sense of these. By spinning out discussion, thinking fast on my feet, and taking longer than usual breaks, I was able, I think, to get away with it.

Why was I so reluctant to let people in on the secret that I wasn’t ready for what happened? Why couldn’t I just be open and honest with them and admit I was taken by surprise and I wasn’t sure what to do next? One thing I know is that the next time I try this – and it’ll be a while after today’s experience – I’ll make sure I scale down my expectations about how long it’ll take and I’ll have plenty of fallback material in case the simulation activity part of it finishes before I’m expecting it.

Dealing with the Impostor Syndrome

How can this feeling of impostorship be kept under control? The key, I think, is to make the phenomenon public. Once impostorship is named as an everyday experience, it loses much of its power. It becomes commonplace and quotidian rather than a shameful, ugly secret. To hear someone you admire talking graphically and convincingly about their own frequent moments of impostorship is enormously reassuring. If they feel exactly the way we do, then perhaps we are not so bad after all. In public forums and private conversations, teachers who are acclaimed as successful can do a great deal to defuse the worst effects of the impostor syndrome by admitting to its reality in their lives.

Being involved in team or peer teaching also makes us less prone to being stricken by feelings of impostorship. When you teach a class with one or two colleagues, you have built-in critical mirrors available to you. As you walk


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across campus after what you think is a bad session and you start to engage in your usual enthusiastic bout of self-flagellation, your colleagues are likely to point out the things that went well. They will tell you about the situations you handled confidently and how impressed they were with your abilities. They will provide you with immediate multiple perspectives on events that you have seen only one way and suggest readings of students’ actions that would never have occurred to you.

Critical reflection and teacher discussion groups invariably surface the theme of impostorship. Once one person has revealed her feelings in this regard, a ripple or domino effect occurs. One after the other, the members of the group give their own illustrations of the phenomenon. The tricky part is to get someone to admit to it in the first place. This is where experienced teachers can be particularly helpful. By admitting to their own feelings of impostorship, experienced teachers can ease the way for junior colleagues to speak. So joining or forming a reflection group can be an important strategy to keep a sense of impostorship in its proper place.

The feeling of being an impostor can ruin a teacher’s life. Taken to extreme levels, it is crippling. The worst way to live as a teacher is to believe that you are the only one who is falling short of the perfection that you suspect is exemplified in your colleagues’ practices. Few of us are strong enough to continue working if we are burdened with the sense that all around us are paragons of pedagogic virtue, while we ourselves are incompetent amateurs struggling to keep intact our false mask of command. The sense of aloneness this induces is almost impossible to bear.

However, feeling like an impostor is not a totally negative phenomenon. Indeed, properly controlled, it can be productively troubling. It stops us being complacent and ensures that we see our practice as being in constant evolution – after all, we always know we could do better. Teachers who remain completely free of all and any feelings of impostorship may well be teachers who have an overdeveloped sense of confidence in their own capacities. Never to feel humbled in the presence of students or colleagues can betoken an unhealthy streak of arrogance or a well-developed talent for denial. Additionally, any teacher who steps into a faculty or staff development role needs the humility borne of an awareness of her own impostorship. If teachers pick up a whiff of presumed superiority in a staff developer, that person may as well pack up and go home.

Teachers who never have the feeling that the things are slipping beyond their control are teachers who are probably staying safely within habitual, comfortable ways of thinking and acting. Teachers who see themselves as fully formed and capable of responding appropriately to any crisis that circumstance throws their way may well be in stasis or denial. I wouldn’t want to work with anyone who didn’t have some feelings of impostorship, who didn’t feel a sense of struggling in the dark, of trying to draw meaning from contradictory and often opaque experiences. To feel this is to open up permanent possibilities for change and development in our practice.


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Pre-course reading, or reading for S6: Using a Critical Approach 1 or 2

ERIC Identifier: ED441351 Publication Date: 1999-12-00 Author: Van Duzer, Carol - Florez, MaryAnn Cunningham Source: National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education Washington DC.

Critical Literacy for Adult Literacy in Language Learners. ERIC Digest.

THIS DIGEST WAS CREATED BY ERIC, THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT ERIC, CONTACT ACCESS ERIC 1-800-LET-ERIC

What is heard (e.g., news reports, public speakers, conversation) and what is read (e.g., newspapers, tabloids, Internet-based material) is not necessarily accurate nor unbiased. Learners need to develop skills to identify and work with this non-neutral facet of language (Hull, 2000). Critical literacy takes learners beyond the development of basic literacy skills such as decoding, predicting, and summarizing and asks them to become critical consumers of the information they receive.


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6:16:2


This digest examines what critical literacy means. It discusses why critical literacy is important to include in instruction for adults learning English as a second language (ESL) and gives some examples of how this can be done.

CRITICAL LITERACY: THE CONCEPT

Critical literacy encompasses a range of critical and analytical attitudes and skills used in the process of understanding and interpreting texts, both spoken and written. Currently, in adult education, it is most often discussed in relation to literacy and language learning. In these contexts, it draws from a number of related theories concerned with the constant interplay of reader and text in the meaning-making process (Auerbach, 1999; Brown, 1999; Clark, 1995; Hood, Solomon, & Burns, 1996).

In its broadest sense, the term critical literacy refers to efforts to go beyond surface meaning of a text by questioning the who, what, why, and how of its creation and eventual interpretation (Lohrey, 1998). However, depending on the ideas, approaches, and pedagogies embraced by those using it, critical literacy can take different forms in actual practice. For example, for those who recognize that language use is not neutral, critical literacy is a means for examining the interaction of language and power relationships. For those who believe that language and text are intended to persuade, justify, entertain, and so on, critical literacy is a means of identifying the writer's or speaker's purpose and for eventually using the language oneself for such purposes. For theorists who derive their concept of critical literacy from Freire-a Brazilian educator who believed that education and knowledge have power only when they help learners liberate themselves from oppressive social conditions (Peyton & Crandall, 1995)--it is a way in which learners can decipher the issues that drive society, empower themselves, and ultimately take social action. (Auerbach, 1999; Brown, 1999; Hammond & Macken Horarik, 1999; Hull, 2000). Many practitioners and theorists look at critical literacy practice as a combination of these perspectives (Brown, 1999).

"Related terminology such as critical thinking, critical pedagogy, critical practice, critical theory, genre theory, and critical language awareness are sometimes used in conjunction with critical literacy, thus making understanding of the term even more complex. For an in depth discussion of critical approaches to teaching ESOL, see the Autumn 1999 issue of TESOL Quarterly, which is dedicated to this topic."

REASONS FOR CRITICAL LITERACY INSTRUCTION

Good listeners and readers make use of their background knowledge to evaluate what they are hearing or reading. Because texts often presuppose cultural knowledge, social attitudes, or the views of a particular segment of society, adult English language learners can benefit from instruction that helps them look critically at texts. Learners can be encouraged to question the social, political, and ideological elements in what they hear, say, read, and write. In this way, they can more fully explore the issues that affect their lives


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and consider the consequences of taking action to address these issues (Auerbach, 1999; Brown, 1999; Hammond & Macken Horarik, 1999; Hull, 2000). Lessons that incorporate critical literacy perspectives can help learners examine the source of a text, including its biases and purposes; question the veracity and applicability of the information being provided in terms of their own lives; assess the broader societal messages about values, attitudes, and power relationships that are being conveyed through the text; and consider their own biases, reactions, and realities in relation to the text. Thus, these lessons will contribute to learners' more comprehensive understanding of texts and the larger society (Brown, 1999; Hood, Solomon, & Burns, 1996; Lohrey, 1998).

Regardless of the form in which critical literacy is practiced in the classroom, there is recognition of the need for English language learners to take critical stances toward reading, writing, speaking, or listening. Variations on critical literacy practices can be found in standards efforts such as Equipped for the Future (Stein, 2000) and in the list of skills and competencies identified by the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991).

CRITICAL LITERACY ACTIVITIES

Both advanced level and beginning adult ESL learners can participate in activities that develop critical literacy skills. With "higher level English language learners," a teacher might add a few questions or a different perspective to activities already being used. For example, after students have read a news article, the teacher might ask, "Why do you think this text was written?" "What language in the text gives you clues about its purpose?" "How would this article have been written in your country?" "How could this article have been written to better target your community in the United States?" In another activity, learners can examine a local English language newspaper, comparing its article topics, writing style, sections, photographs, and layout to those of a local native language newspaper. The students can then discuss what these aspects reveal about both cultures and how this can influence who reads the newspapers and which advertisers support them. In activities like these, learners are prompted not only to ask questions about the information presented, but also to relate this information to their own perceptions, attitudes, and realities.

Although these types of activities are also appropriate for "learners at lower English proficiency levels," teachers need to build in more contextual and linguistic supports, discuss issues that are relevant to the learners, and use concrete materials such as codes. Codes are pictures, text, or speech representations of themes or issues that are used with follow-up questions to trigger reflection, dialogue, and critical thinking among a group of learners. Because they are simple, familiar, focused representations of complex, often emotionally charged issues or situations, codes can be structured for use with low level learners (Auerbach, 1992). For example, in a unit on families, learners might listen to a short, simple dialogue between a child's teacher and a father, in which the teacher tells the father that the family should speak


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English at home to help improve the child's English. The learners can then move through sets of questions that progress from describing the situation and the issue (Who is the woman? Who is the man? Where are they? What are they talking about? How does the teacher feel? How does the father feel? Why are they talking?) to examining the issue in terms of their own lives and in terms of the larger social context (Do you have children? Do you talk to your children's teachers? What do they say? How do you feel? In your country, did you talk to your children's teachers? What did they say? What language do you speak at home? Why? Why does the teacher here give this advice? Do you agree with her? Is this advice good for everyone?)

CRITICAL LITERACY STRATEGIES

Teachers can make critical thinking and critical analysis a regular part of all classroom work in the following ways:

* Start with information sources (articles, advertisements, speeches, dialogues, pictures, videos) that are obviously biased or ideologically loaded, such as an advertising campaign against smoking, and then progress to more subtle examples, such as a play or sitcom that demonstrates negative aspects of smoking.

* Raise awareness by pointing out critical literacy skills when they are exhibited by the teacher or by learners.

* Choose readings or listening, speaking, or writing activities that are relevant and interesting for learners.

* Prompt learners to examine how their own experiences and values relate to and influence their approaches to topics.

* Understand that some learners may feel uncomfortable expressing opinions, especially if this kind of learning approach is new to them.

* Be aware that multiple interpretations of information and different points of view may or may not be represented in classroom texts, materials, and discussions, so choose activities in which learners must consider a variety of perspectives.

* Build in time for learners to become comfortable with texts or activities before asking them to look at them critically.

* Have learners formulate questions as well as answer them.

* Balance instruction in basic literacy skills (decoding, vocabulary building, predicting, summarizing) with practice in critical analysis skills.

* Provide support for challenging aspects of a task (pre practice new vocabulary or grammar points, clarify the main idea of a text, choose a familiar topic, etc.) so that learners can focus on critical or analytical points.


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* Use authentic texts (newspaper articles, advertisements, letters, news broadcasts) and less traditional literacy texts (graffiti, cartoons, commercials, television sitcoms) whenever possible.

* Shift from an emphasis on finding a right answer to eliciting ranges of interpretations that are supported by sound reasoning and thoughtful examination.

CONCLUSION

Critical literacy is a way of interacting with information that goes beyond the decoding of letters and words. It encourages learners to engage with information sources and to question the social contexts, purposes, and possible effects that they have on their lives. It also asks them to look at their own opinions, biases, and perceptions of reality, and to consider those of others. For adult ESL learners, critical literacy can be a means of comprehensively exploring the new language and culture in which they find themselves.

REFERENCES

Auerbach, E. (1992). "Making meaning, making change." McHenry, IL and Washington, DC: Delta Systems Co., Inc. and Center for Applied Linguistics. [Reprint in press] Auerbach, E. (1999). The power of writing, the writing of power: Approaches to adult ESOL writing instruction. "Focus on Basics, 3" (D), 1, 3-6. Brown, K. (1999). "Developing critical literacy." Sydney, Australia: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research. Clark, R. (1995). Developing critical reading practices. "Prospect 10" (2), 65-80. Hammond, J., & Macken-Horarik, M. (1999). Critical literacy: Challenges and questions for ESL Classrooms. "TESOL Quarterly, 33" (3), 528 543. Hood, S., Solomon, N., & Burns, A. (1996). "Focus on reading." Sydney, Australia: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research. Hull, G. (2000, April). Critical literacy at work. "Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 43" (7), 648-652. Lohrey, A. (1998). "Critical literacy: A professional development resource." Melbourne, Australia: Language Australia. Peyton, J.K., & Crandall, J.A. (1995). "Philosophies and approaches in adult ESL instruction." ERIC Digest. Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education. (EDRS No. ED 386 960) Stein, S. (2000). "Equipped for the future content standards: What adults need to know and be able to do in the 21st century." Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy.


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U.S. Department of Labor, Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills. (1991). "What work requires of schools: A SCANS report for America 2000." Washington, DC: Author. (EDRS No. ED 332 054) ERIC/NCLE Digests are available free of charge from the National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education (NCLE), 4646 40th Street NW, Washington, DC 20016-1859; (202) 362-0700, ext. 200; e-mail: [email protected]. on the web at www.cal.org/ncle/DIGESTS Documents with ED numbers can be ordered from ERIC Document Reproduction Service (EDRS) at 800-443-ERIC (3742) or 703-440-1400; fax: 703-440-1408; e-mail: http://edrs.com. The National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education (NCLE) is operated by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) with funding from the U.S. Department of Education (ED), Office of Vocational and Adult Education, under contract no. RI 93002010. The opinions expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of OERI or ED. This document is in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission.

[Return to ERIC Digest Search Page]

Taken from Using Experience for Learning ed. Boud D, Cohen R and Walker D (SRHE and Open University Press, 1993), pp21-32. Used with permission.

Through the Lens of Learning:How the Visceral Experience of Learning Reframes Teaching

Stephen Brookfield

This chapter outlines an approach to helping teachers reframe their practice by encouraging them to analyse their visceral experiences as learners. Interpreting practice as a consequence of experiencing learning is probably done anecdotally by many educators when they draw upon memories of their own student experiences and determine that they will never perpetuate the outrages that were visited on them by teachers. In this chapter, I make the case that we can view our own practices as educators in a more formalized and purposeful way. In particular, I argue that regularly experiencing what it feels like to learn something unfamiliar and difficult is the best way to help teachers empathize with the emotions and feelings of their own learners as they begin to traverse new intellectual terrains.

How I learned to stop worrying and trust my experience: Notes for a screenplay


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Opening Scene: Teachers College Swimming Pool, New York, November 1983

Spluttering, coughing out what seems like pure chlorine, I raise my head out of the water to see where I am. I know where I am in a larger sense – I’m in an Adult Swimming Class – but where am I in the pool? I also know that I’ve hit tiling (again) and that must mean that I’ve veered across the lanes and swum a width rather than a length of the pool. When I open my eyes, remove the chlorine solution and see that I’m at the other end of the pool from where I started a few minutes ago – that I’ve swum a length – I feel a startling jolt of pride, an unalloyed rush of pure happiness. I can’t believe it – I’ve actually swum a length of a swimming pool! Me, who thought that practically all aspects of the physical, athletic world were closed to me. Me, who thinks of myself as a psychomotor dolt, someone whose limbs seem never to respond properly to signals from the brain. At some level, I believed I could never do this, never make it down from one end of a swimming pool to another.

Insight: The phenomenological meaning of a learning event can have little to do with supposedly objective measures of accomplishment. On almost any measurement scale available for assessing progress as a swimmer, my performance in swimming the length is pretty pitiful, not to say pathetic. People forty years my senior are zooming past me in the water as I splutter painfully down the designated slow lane in the pool. But that doesn’t matter, or even register with me; my feeling of pride is so overwhelming as to make this first ever swimming of a length a critical high point in the phenomenological terrain of my experiences as a learner in the last ten years.

Cut to…

Scene Two: A rainy, foggy night on an Italian auto-route, November 1989

As a sabbatical project I have decided, at the age of forty, to learn to drive a car. Initially, at the end of a five-month stay in Provence, my goal was to be able to negotiate the road from the farmhouse where we are living into the local town three miles away. However, six weeks after starting to learn under my wife’s instruction (despite the marital risks this entails), I feel so confident of my newly developed skill that I take the wheel for large chunks of our journey to Bologna where we are going to spend a long weekend. Ignoring my wife’s warnings that driving on a foggy, rainy night is stressful enough for experienced drivers on quiet back roads, let alone an Italian auto-route, I insist that ‘the only way to learn something is to do it’. Eventually, after several ‘white knuckle’ experiences (a nicely descriptive phrase referring to passengers gripping the dashboard in anticipation of their imminent demise), I accept that I’m placing the lives of our family in real danger by persisting any longer in driving. I let my wife take the wheel and I sink into a near catatonic state, a state I imagine resembles the falsely comforting enervation travellers trapped in snow drifts feel just before they slip into their last sleep.


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Insight: Under the adrenalin rush induced by making much quicker progress than they had anticipated in a learning project, it is easy for learners to develop a vastly inflated and (sometimes literally) dangerously unrealistic notion of their capabilities. This is the dark side of self-actualization, the often unacknowledged contradiction at the heart of much rhetoric about self-direction. After emerging from my catatonia, I am reminded of how important (and how difficult) it is for me as a teacher to balance a healthy and necessary emphasis on nurturing learners’ tentatively emerging belief that they can accomplish something they had previously considered beyond their reach, with an attention to the dangers entailed by espousing the rhetoric of empowerment and letting them think they have the ability immediately to do anything to which they set their minds.

The point of these opening two scenes is also the point of this chapter; as a teacher, one of the most useful, and most ignored, sources of insight into your own practice is your own autobiography as a learner. Most importantly, perhaps, is the visceral nature of the experiences your autobiography represents. Any number of texts emphasize the importance of reflecting critically on the assumptions underlying practice and there is plenty advice on methods that can be used to this end (Brookfield 1987; Schön 1987; Mezirow and Associates 1990). But the stream of writing on reflective practice tends to appeal at a cerebral, rather than visceral level. Much staff and faculty development which is geared towards developing critical reflection does this through exposing educators to writings on critical pedagogy (Livingstone 1987) and to Schön’s (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. These are valuable writings which I have used myself, but I feel there is a real possibility that they are often considered at a cognitive, intellectual level, without having the influence on practice that the emotionality of direct experience provides. For example, reading these works can fire us with radical zeal without giving us a sense of how that zeal can change our daily practices. We can readily agree with any number of exhortatory, prescriptive injunctions concerning the need for critical reflection, and profess that we exemplify this process, without changing any aspect of our practice. It is easy to read an inspirational text such as Collins’ (1991) critique of mainstream adult educational practice, and then to vow to reappraise one’s practice in terms of its hidden paternalism, relativistic naivety, masked technicism and repressive tolerance. Such resolutions are important and can have a marked effect, but they can also easily become sincerely espoused principles, which somehow never quite manage to manifest themselves in markedly changed actions.

Letting go: Using the visceral experience of learning to challenge espoused orthodoxy in adult education

In this section, I would like to draw explicitly on two experiential themes in my own autobiography as a learner that have influenced my practice as a teacher. The experiences described are visceral rather than cognitive and both of them contradict some aspect of the espoused orthodoxy of adult educational theory and practice into which I had been initiated (and which I had accepted uncritically) during my postgraduate study. I will describe general features of these experiences and then try to show how my reflections



on them caused me to question and reframe some part of my practice as an adult educator.

Screaming for attention: Participating in discussions

One of the most cherished tenets of adult educational practice is that discussion is an educational method that exemplifies the participatory, democratic spirit central to the field. In American adult education, I would argue that Lindeman’s belief that discussion was the adult educational method par excellence (Lindeman 1987) continues to this day. More recently, this belief that participating in discussion represents the quintessential adult educational experience has been strengthened by the critical and theoretical edge evident in writings by Freire (1970), Mezirow (1991) and Collins (1991), all of whom draw on the Frankfurt School of critical social theory in arguing (convincingly, in my view) that adult education’s task is to create conditions in which authentic dialogue and communicative discourse can occur. At almost all stages of my own career, I have used discussion as my preferred method, viewing alternative approaches as supplements of essentially inferior status. As an educator, I am very comfortable leading discussions and this method is still one on which I rely greatly. As a learner, however, my visceral experience is very different.

The defining feature of my experience as a participant in discussion is that I feel a constant and overwhelming compulsion to perform; in other words, I feel impelled to make what I believe others would regard as a series of startlingly profound contributions. I see discussion groups as emotional battlegrounds with members vying for recognition and affirmation from each other and from the discussion leader. As a participant, my energy becomes focussed on listening for someone else in the group to make a comment to which I can make some kind of reasonable response. In doing this, I tend not to listen for the merits of different arguments. I am concentrating so hard on finding a conversational opening, a place where I can make some relevant interjection, that any kind of reflective analysis of the accuracy of some other members’ contributions becomes almost impossible. So, in my case, one of the chief arguments that I would cite as an educator for using discussion – that it opens learners to considering carefully alternative perspectives and interpretations – is invalidated by my own behaviour as a learner. When I listen to a spread of opinion voiced within a group, I am not considering seriously the merits or accuracy of alternative viewpoints, so much as seeking an entry point where my voice might be heard.

The reason why I participate in discussions this way is because I have accepted the assumption that successful discussion participation should be equated with the number of verbal contributions one make. Anyone who speaks a lot, so I reason, must be a good participant; and anyone who is silent must, by definition, be mentally inert. As an undergraduate and then graduate student, I learned early on that discussion groups quickly establish a pecking order of communication. The longer one stays silent, the harder it is to make that first contribution. With my own personal mixture of arrogance and introversion, I never contributed to discussions unless I was fairly sure


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that what I was going to say would be universally admired. So once I found the conversational connection I was looking for, and I felt that I had thought enough about that point of connection to be able to make some contribution, I would spend minutes silently rehearsing my remarks. After deciding that my putative contribution was word perfect, I would summon up my courage and, with my palms sweating and my heart cannoning inside my chest, I would stammer out my rehearsed contribution, often only to find that during the time I was rehearsing my comments the discussion had moved on and what I was saying was now pretty irrelevant.

Over the years, the contradictions between my espoused theory of discussion and my experiences as a discussion participant have become more and more glaring. They have prompted me to change significantly aspects of my pedagogic practice. I now think much more carefully about why and when to use discussion, and I make much more of an effort to evolve ground rules to guide discussion participation, and I am very careful to make explicit my ideas concerning what good discussion participation looks like. As a direct result of my own experiences as a learner in this format I am especially concerned, as a teacher, to make it clear to members that it is as important to listen carefully and critically to others’ contributions as it is to make them oneself. I broaden the definition of participation to include not only the act of speaking, but also more silent contributions such as being a group recorder or summarizer, bringing a salient piece of research or polemic to the session for the group’s attention, calling for periods of silent reflective analysis in the midst of heated debate, and Xeroxing insights about the nature of previous discussion sessions that were contained in a participant’s learning journal. Also, I’ll try to remember to begin a discussion session with a new group by telling them that they don’t need to speak frequently as a way of signalling their diligence, and that I don’t equate active listening or silent reflective analysis with mental inertia.

Overall, my repeated experiences as a discussion participant have alerted me to the fact that participating in authentic dialogue, or meeting the minimum conditions of communicative discourse, is not something which comes easily to adults. As described by Collins (1991: 12), this kind of discourse is ‘a kind of on-going, thoughtful conversation’ in which ‘all participants anticipate that their individual contributions will receive serious considerations from others. At the same time they remain open to changing or reconstructing their own stance on the problem under consideration in the light of what others have to say and the weight of all relevantly identified information’. Since many group contexts of adult life are infused with considerations of power and status – we learn that success, conventionally defined, is often attained by flattering or mimicking those in power – it is naïve for a discussion leader to imagine that adults can sign up for a course and engage immediately in democratic, critical, authentic, reciprocal, respectful discussion. Yet, as I reflect on my practice as an educator, I am embarrassed to realize just how much I have assumed that this capacity is innate, or easily awakened, and have missed entirely the dynamics and tensions of power differences, and the need learners feel to please the leader by mimicry, that have been such a feature of my experiences with this method as a learner.


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Practising what you preach: The importance of credibility and authenticity

Allied to adult education’s traditional reverence for the use of the discussion method is the emphasis placed in the field on small group exercises. Most variants of small group exercises ask participants to offer some part of their experiences for analysis by other group members. When people hear the term ‘andragogy’, they probably equate this with some form of small group exercise, and, in the USA at least, a regular reliance on the small group method is generally taken as evidence of adult education’s admirable learner-centred, democratic, collegial character. In my own practice, I have often moved to some kind of small group task as early as possible in the belief that doing so sends a strong symbolic message that my ideas and experiences are not the most important resources in the learning group. Indeed, I have often opened the first meeting of a course by telling participants that as adults they probably have the skills and knowledge they’ve come to learn, it’s just that they’re not aware that they already possess these. My task, I continue, is to help them realize that they already know much more than they think they do, and I urge that they look to their own experiences, rather than to my supposed expertise, as they negotiate this course. As I make this speech, I have often taken a quiet pride in the fact that such acknowledgements of learners’ experiences show me off to good personal advantage; as a self-deprecating, collegial, down-to-earth sort who has no time for academic pomposity.

During my years of behaving this way as an educator, I was also witnessing this kind of interaction from a participant’s view, without ever connecting the two in my mind. I would often show up at professional gatherings, academic conferences and in-service workshops eager to learn something from the person or persons advertised as leading a particular session. What caused me to choose one session or workshop over another was the fact that leading the event would be a particular individual, whose word-of-mouth reputation, published work or conference biography promised that my time would be well spent. Yet, when this same person, citing ‘principles of good adult educational practice’, came into the session and announced that we, as participants, already knew what we thought we had come to learn, and that we were going to form small groups and spend the first portion of the event taking an inventory of all the valuable experiences we had accumulated, my first reactions were to feel annoyed and cheated. I had come primed to learn from this person, and I would say ‘how dare he or she put the emphasis right back on me’.

This question would quickly be followed by a rueful admission to myself that I was falling into the same teacher-dependent, passive modes of learning which I was trying to avoid perpetuating in my own students. So, for quite a few years I would say to myself, ‘alright, so I’m temporarily feeling cheated by this person’s throwing the emphasis for my own learning back on to my shoulders, but this only goes to show just how deeply those despicable other-


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directed, dependent ways of learning are internalised, even in supposedly progressive educators!’ But the feeling of being cheated never really went away and, as a result, a new interpretation began to emerge; one which is, incidentally, confirmed many adult learners’ critical incident reports, interviews and learning journals (Brookfield 1990a). This interpretation runs as follows.

Before educators can ask groups of strangers to turn to each other, form small groups and reveal something about their own experiences, those educators must somehow model the process themselves. They must take the initiative, through their actions, of setting an emotional tone for small group work. Teachers must earn the right to ask people to reveal aspects of themselves to strangers, by first doing this publicly in front of their learners. Teachers’ actions, whether they like this or not (and most adult educators I know detest this idea) are granted enormous symbolic significance by learners. So for an adult educator to walk into a room full of strangers and ask them to ‘share their insights and experiences’ with each other in small groups, without having first done this himself or herself in front of the whole group, is to miss entirely a crucial moment in terms of creating the right emotional tone under which authentic discourse can occur. I realize that now I, and others, are sometimes right to feel cheated when the first thing that happens is that we are put into small groups. It is as if the leader sees herself or himself as somehow above the fray, as possessing a superiority of insight, a private analytical line truth. There is also the suspicion that the leader has some kind of hidden agenda that will be revealed at a later point, by which time we will have spoken things that, in terms of this agenda, makes us look stupid.

As I think about learning episodes in my life that have held, or do hold, enormous terror for me, I realize that one of the most important factors which pulls me through these activities intact is my understanding in the educator’s credibility and authenticity. When I feel that someone has some valuable skill, knowledge, experience and insight, and when I know that he or she is being open and honest with me, I am much more willing to try to do something which holds great threat for me, and to risk failure in the attempt. I have, for example, resisted for many years trying white water rafting; but if I am ever cajoled into taking a white water rafting trip, the last thing I want is to be on the river bank one morning with the distant sound of churning rapids pounding in my ears listening to the instructor tell me that I already know how to do this, that the instructor will learn as much from me as I will from him or her, and that the other fear-stricken novices in the group are as valuable a resource as the leader’s experiences. What I need to hear is that the leader has navigated this stretch of river, or others like it, a thousand times, and that if I just learn some basic rules of survival I’ll stand a much better chance of making it through this experience physically and psychologically intact.

One of the experiences which perhaps parallels the terror that would be induced by learning how to participate in white water rafting is learning how to take someone through childbirth. Anyone who has gone through the experience of watching someone they love give birth to a child knows the terror this prospect can induce. Our daughter had been born by a Caesarean


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section operation after an excruciating forty-six hour labour and one part of me hoped that if ever we were going to have another child the doctors would insist on rescheduling this operation. When we learned my wife was pregnant with our second child, and that a natural birth was possible, I experienced a cowardly craving for some honourable way to avoid being a ‘coach’. I secretly longed for an earlier era when all I would have been required to do was hang around in the waiting room and give out cigars when the good news came through. All the pain, blood and suffering of a natural childbirth (there didn’t seem to be much that was natural about it to me) was something I would have been glad to avoid, if there had been a suitable available excuse for someone who, like me, professed feminine ideas. However, no politically correct exit with honour was possible, so in 1990 I became a member of a refresher course on preparation for childbirth. I learned how to shout out instructions to my wife about breathing through the contractions of childbirth, and how to tell her when, and for how long, to push out our son. As I tried out these skills, and learned to recognize the cues for different breathing techniques and patterns, I needed our childbirth instructor to show me explicitly and exactly how she would do these things and to give me a solid grounding in timing contractions, changing breathing patterns and yelling out instructions for pushing.

In this situation – faced with the fact that I now had to live up to my espoused values – the last thing I wanted to hear from my instructor was that I already knew how to do this, it was just that I didn’t realize I had this knowledge and skill dormant within me. I knew, at a deeply internalised level, that that was total rubbish, and if the first thing that had happened in the class that we were put into small groups to discuss how our past experiences had helped us develop these skills without our knowing it, I would have left. As soon as I had learned the basic techniques under expert instruction, however, I was then quite ready to participate in small group discussions with other ‘coaches’ about the fears we were suffering regarding our abilities to be of any use to the mother in the delivery room. I was also ready to hear from others who had been through the experience before, and to review events in my own life to see if there were, indeed, times when I had been required to act in ways that weren’t so different from what I was going to have to do in the delivery room.

Insight: What I have drawn from this and other similar experiences as a learner is that small group work can be enormously beneficial when the leader of the activity models the qualities of openness and honesty he or she hopes will characterize the small group interactions. Small group work has to be timed carefully, and progressively minded adult educators like myself have to resist the temptation of hurtling precipitously and mindlessly into such exercises. I have also come to realize that when an educator gives participants (particularly those who are terrified at the prospect of doing something they would much rather avoid) the sense that they are in the hands of someone whose experience in this area is of considerable breadth, depth and intensity, the level of anxiety surrounding the new learning is considerably reduced (though never entirely eliminated). These insights have directly influenced how I approach teaching critical thinking (Brookfield 1987, 1990b).


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My approach to teaching critical thinking is one which emphasizes participants’ exploring their own autobiographies, using their experiences as the raw material for critical analysis. I rely a great deal on small group exercises, conducted in triads, through which participants are asked to choose critical incidents which illustrate the kinds of assumptions that have framed their actions, and which they have accepted uncritically. One of my own framing assumptions regarding how critical thinking can be developed, is that since it is enormously difficult to stand outside of one’s own interpretive frameworks through an act of one’s own mental volition, this activity is usually best conducted in small group formats. In earlier years, I would move as quickly as possible to small group exercises in which participants told stories about high and low points in their experiences, and then invited other triad members to tell them what assumptions they though were embedded in those stories.

Reflecting on my own insights as a workshop participant in small group exercises, I began to realise that I was missing an important step. Now, before asking groups to engage in any analysis of critical events in their own lives, I am careful to undertake this activity in front of them. I try to earn the right to ask them to think critically about their own experiences by first inviting their critical analysis of my own actions. I speak, as honestly and descriptively as I can, about a high or low point in my life as an educator and then invite participants to give me their best insights about the uncritically accepted assumptions they see informing my choice of that particular event as good or bad, and about the assumptions they see embedded in the specific actions I describe. Very frequently I discover a dark side to the ‘high’ events I choose as learners make interpretations and detect assumptions which cast my conduct in much murkier light than I would wish. Since making this key change in my practice, I have often had people come up to me and tell me that seeing me first take the risk of inviting critical analysis of my own hidden, taken-for-granted assumptions encouraged them to be more honest in their subsequent small group exercises than would normally have been the case.

In an interesting commentary on the reluctance of adult educators to see their practice as teacher-centred as well as learner-centred, Collins (1991) argues that ‘it is more efficacious to think in terms of engaging thoughtfully with theory and, then, putting ourselves into practice rather than putting theory into practice’ (p.47). This is a nice turn of phrase, which is full of rich implications for the development of educators. It means that we must take seriously the consequences that our own actions have within a group and that we should stop pretending that how we behave has no symbolic or political significance. As someone who is asked frequently to advise on faculty development and in-service education, I believe that the best use of often limited time is for teachers to find ways of studying how their actions are perceived by learners. Realizing how critical it is for me as a learner to trust an educator’s basic credibility and authenticity – in particular, for me to feel that the actions and words are consistent – has made me much more attuned to making sure that I don’t espouse one way of working and then behave in a way which


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contradicts my avowed beliefs. Better to make no promises at all than to commit to some way of working and then fail to follow through. I am now painfully aware that the extent to which I model the application of critical analysis to my own beliefs and actions is sometimes directly connected to learners’ willingness to behave in the same way.

Scrutinizing our biographies: Critical checks on generalizing from experience

The kinds of subjective, idiosyncratic experiences outlined in this chapter cannot, of course, be considered as the only basis for developing a practical theory of teaching. Indeed, there are very real dangers in relying on one’s autobiography as a guide to action. So much of our experience is irredeemably context-bound; what are thought to be well-grounded insights culled from reflective analysis of experiences in one context can be rendered wholly invalid in another context. As Usher and Bryant (1989) point out in their analysis of the processes of practical theory development, experience without critical analysis can be little more than anecdotal reminiscence; interesting, but unconnected, experiential travellers’ tales from the front lines of practice. Simon (1988:3) also recognizes the conservatism inherent in much rhetoric on experiential learning and asks “how can one avoid simply celebrating personal experience and confirming that which people already know? If experiences like the ones I have described are going to have a serious, continuing influence on practice, they need to be submitted to two different forms of critical review.

First, formal theory has an important contribution to make in helping to convert situationally specific, informal hunches into well-framed theories of practice. Collins (1991:51), for example, writes that ‘serious commitment to adult education as vocation implies that its practitioners as intellectuals should be prepared to read and engage with theoretical texts as they begin to theorize their own practice’ and argues that ‘serious engagement with theoretical models improves our potential as reflective practitioners, which in turn manifests itself in actual performance’ (p.47). To Usher (1989), formal theory serves as ‘a kind of resource and “sounding board” for the development and refinement of informal theory – a way of bringing critical analysis to bear on the latter’ (p.88). In the process of practical theory development, the inductively derived, situational insights regarding practice which are embedded in particular contexts and experiences can be reviewed through the more universalistic lens provided by formal theoretical perspectives. Hence, it is important that these formal perspectives be developed as carefully as possible.

Secondly, assumptions derived from experience that frame practice can be submitted to a form of collaborative scrutiny; that is to say, educators working in similar and allied contexts can compare their hunches, instincts and intuitions. In this way, educators can gradually become more sophisticated at recognising contextual cues – events and features that signal those times when certain assumptions should be held in check and those times when they


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can confidently be used as provisional guidelines for action. In my own in-service and faculty development workshops with teachers, I have experimented with the critical incident technique as a means of helping them uncover the assumptions that undergird their habitual ways of acting and reasoning about their practice (Brookfield 1992). After assumptions have been identified through a process of small group analysis, I ask group members to pick out those assumptions on which there exists the greatest amount of agreement. When these assumptions have been identified, group members are asked to take each assumption in turn and draw on their experiences to find three invalidating circumstances (the number is arbitrary); that is, to find three factors, events or variables that, if they existed, would make following these commonly held assumptions a risky prospect. For example, one common assumption that surfaces with teachers can be stated as follows: ‘praising learners for work well done strengthens learners’ desire to engage in further learning.’ When teachers have examined their own experiences of giving praise, they have identified various invalidating circumstances that, if they are in place, would call this assumption in to question. The three most frequently mentioned invalidating circumstances are:

1. When the praise is given so fulsomely that learners infer that they are so expert at the task or subject matter involved that there is no more learning that needs to be done.

2. When the method of giving praise is so laconic and understated (perhaps the praiser equates giving praise with not publicly tearing another’s efforts to shreds) that it is not explicitly recognized by the learner as praise and, therefore, has no encouraging effect.

3. When there is something in the cultural background of the learners that makes the public receiving of praise an uncomfortable experience for them.

Through exercises such as those described, practitioners can serve as reflective mirrors for each other’s informal theories, helping to focus attention on those parts, which have the greatest validity across contexts, and on those parts, which are unique to a specific setting.

References

Brookfield, S.D. (1987) Developing Critical Thinkers. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brookfield, S.D. (1990a) The Skillful Teacher. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brookfield, S.D. (1990b) Using critical incidents to analyse learners’ assumptions. In Mezirow, J. and Associates, Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.


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Brookfield, S.D. (1992) Uncovering Assumptions: They key to reflective practice. Adult Learning, 3(4): 13-14, 18.

Collins, M. (1991) Adult Education as Vocation. London: Routledge.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Lindeman, E.C.L. (1987) The place of discussion in the learning process. In Brookfield, S.D. (ed.) Learning Democracy: Edward Lindeman on Adult Education and Social Change. London: Routledge.

Livingstone, D.W. (ed.) (1987) Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.

Mezirow, J. (1991) Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Mezirow, J. and Associates (1990) Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Schön, D.A. (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco, CA:Jossey-Bass

Shor, I. (ed.) (1987) Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook

Shor, I. And Friere, P. (1987) A Pedagogy for Liberation. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.

Simon, R. (1988) For a pedagogy of possibility. Critical Pedagogy Networker, 1(1):1-4.

Usher, R.S. (1989) Locating adult education in the practical. In Bright, B (ed.) Theory and Practice in the Study of Adult Education: The Epistemological Debate, pp. 65-93. London: Routledge.

Usher, R.S. and Bryant, I. (1989) Adult Education as Theory, Practice and Research: The Captive Triangle. . London: Routledge.


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