Week Six--Promoting Autonomy and Self-Direction

I. The reading for this week--Chapter 6 (Promoting Autonomy and Self-Direction) from our text Learning and Change in the Adult Years, with highlights from the chapter:

• The idea of autonomous or self-directed learning is firmly entrenched in contemporary thinking about adult education, and there has been a great deal of scholarly interest in the subject.
• The autonomous person has three qualities: freedom of choice, rational reflection, and strength of will.
• Self-direction in learning embraces four distinct phenomena: personal autonomy, the willingness and capacity to manage one's own learning, an environment allowing some effective control by the learner, and the independent pursuit of learning without formal institutional suport or affiliation.
• Learners at different stages of ego development have different assumptions (and therefore expectations) about the purpose and potentail of education, different capacities to frame educational goals, and different interpretations of the meaning of educational experiences.
• Education is inextricably bound up with developmental change, and teaching practices need to take into account the developmental capacity and potential of learners.
• The development of reflective skills, that is, the ability to select from and problematize experience, is considered the key to learning from experience.
• Practical intelligence is largely domain specific while reflective judgment is considered a generic capacity--while the problems being thought about are ill-structured they remain context free and therefore the language used to analyze them is more abstract and academic.
• There are four categories of skills that a competent learner should possess: 1) Flexible application of a well-organized, domain specific knowledge base; 2) Heuristic methods; 3) Metacognitive skills; 4) Learning strategies.
• The hallmark of the autonomous learner is the person who has developed a critical capacity in a particular subject area.
• The challenge for adult educators is to promote situated autonomy in the context of their own work.
• "A learning need is the gap between where you are now and where you want to be in regard to a particular set of competencies" (Knowles, 1978).

II. Fellow cohort, Francine Oran led the seminar again this week--two of her proposed questions:

Question #1

Weathersby talks about the education ego stages starting on page 24.
Weathersby argues that teachers need to understand how the ego stage influences the learners' responses to educational intervention (p. 125).
Do you agree or disagree with this way of thinking. Explain.

The participants did some real good sharing on this question--most agreed that "ego stage" does influence the learners to a degree. Where the student is in his or her educational adventures, and what background they have plays out in current education.

Question #2

According to the textbook, there have been many attempts to identify the characteristics of the autonomous or self-directed learner and the role of the teacher in promoting such a learner (p. 131-132).
Knowles (1978) states that the role of the teacher is to assist students to "learn how to learn" (p. 132). I thought that was an interesting phrase. What do you think about his statement? Explain.
Knowles also talks about forming learning contracts on pages 145-146. This reminds me of some of the readings that we had from two quarters ago. Does this make sense to you and why?

Great discussion here, also--most agreed that the role of the teacher is to assist students to "learn how to learn." It just makes sense--if the students don't know how to learn well enough to do the assignments properly, it is the teacher's responsibility to show them how. Just like a mother robin showing little ones how to fly--if they aren't learning right, she keeps on trying!

Francine also provided some very good websites and scholarly articles for the cohorts to read and share on! My favorite was the tennessee.edu p'pt website!

III. My reflections in relation to the "Reflecting on the Seminar" questions:

• I did feel very engaged by Fran's questions and provided resources. She really did some good research and provided good material for us to reflect on, share ideas, and discuss!
• I learned some new terms like "ego stage" and "learning contracts" this week!
• Hopefully, some of this will stay with me during my career!
• I do feel that I participated at a graduate level in this seminar; I shared with the cohorts and tried to keep the discussions going in a productive way.
• The seminars are still proving to be a great learning experience for us all, even if we do disagree on occasion.
• The seminars are a great educational tool--we hope to continue our learning and sharing on an SCC wikki website one of our cohorts, Jessie, created!