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JACE: Abstracts

Volume 12, Number 1, Summer 2006

Employment-Based Education: One Model Of Student Support
Hazel Christie, University of Edinburgh and Moira Dunworth Children’s Hospice Association Scotland

ABSTRACT
Against a background of concern about staff recruitment and retention in social services in the UK, the authors examine one model of employer support for staff undergoing professional training alongside their employment. It is argued that support for these mature students needs to be broader than that normally offered within educational institutions, and this model of bespoke consultancy worked well for one student, who made the transition from academic underachievement to professional qualification with a distinction in her final course. It is suggested that support offered within an employment context can be motivating and more readily accessible to these students, whose locus remains in the workplace while they study.

Keywords: employment-based education; social work; non-traditional students; professional training

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Generative Dialogue As A Transformative Learning Practice In Adult And Higher Education Settings1
Olen Gunnlaugson
University of British Columbia

ABSTRACT
This article explores Scharmer’s account of generative dialogue, which followed from Bohmian dialogue in the 1980s and Isaacs’ research with the MIT Dialogue Project in the early 1990s. It presents the author’s view that generative dialogue offers a useful theoretical framework and effective means for facilitating transformative learning processes within adult and higher education group settings. Specifically, this article examines four distinctions between generative dialogue and conventional perspectives of dialogue, and how generative dialogue can support transformative learning processes within collaborative learning contexts such as cohorts and classrooms.

Keywords: generative dialogue, transformative learning, Bohmian dialogue, adult and higher education

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A Gender Based Analysis Of The Learning-Style Preferences Of Principal Preparation Students
Mack T. Hines III, Sam Houston State University, Texas

ABSTRACT
Determining gender learning-style preferences is necessary in assuring that principal preparation programmes are inclusive of styles that benefit both males and females. The purpose of this study was to determine if there were any gender differences for students in a principal preparation programme on responses to items measuring pedagogy (science of teaching children) and andragogy (science of teaching adults). Of the thirteen items on which there was statistical significance between genders’ preferences, males had higher mean scores on nine items (70 per cent) and females on four items (30 per cent). Males had higher mean scores than females on all items measuring pedagogy and males and females had an equal number of high mean scores in response to items that measured andragogy.

Keywords: andragogy, educator training, gender learning styles, pedagogy, professional training, principals’ training

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Universal Basic Education In Nigeria: Adult Literacy Practice And Policy Reform Needs
Kolawole Kazeem University of Benin, Nigeria and Akpovire Oduaran University of Botswana

ABSTRACT
Innovative policies and practices in mainstreaming adult education on the basis of UNESCO’s model of Education for All (EFA) among member states take different forms. In Nigeria, EFAhas been conceptualised as the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme. UBE has dominated some of the major political options that governments have had to make in Africa, and Nigeria has sought to incorporate adult literacy within this programme. This development is a marked departure from the usual manner of proceeding in the past, and we seek in this paper to explore past adult literacy policy, practices and reviews and the present policy thrusts culminating in the UBE initiative. Such an exploration has become even more necessary because it is being alleged that the adult literacy component of the UBE initiative is diminished by the emphasis placed on the primary education component. The expected outcomes in the UBE programme have not been fully realised, and this implies that the need for policy review aimed at informing literacy policy formulation and implementation practices in Nigeria as well as other developing countries confronting the problem of mass illiteracy is long overdue.
Keywords: Universal Basic Education (UBE); Education For All (EFA); adult education; adult literacy; policy review

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Designing Media And Ict Strategies For Non-Formal Education In Eritrea
C.S.H.N. Murthy, Department of Adult and Media Education, Government of Eritrea

ABSTRACT
Designing media and ICT strategies for a newly formed country like Eritrea, which has endured 30 years of armed struggle, leading to massive destruction followed by serial drought, is fraught with numerous constraints: limitation of human resources (e.g. qualified personnel), infrastructure and financial constraints. At the same time, though it may seem paradoxical, there is an inescapable urgency to generate media and ICT strategies, limitations notwithstanding, to turn out larger groups of people capable of leading the nation from illiteracy and poverty to literacy and greener pastures of a developed economy. A threepronged effort is directed to cover all target groups and key players – one each towards categorised target groups and the other towards the training of radio and television personnel. It has to be followed by sensitising the government, another major key player in the whole process, to lay down required media education policy and to see to its sustainability. Conceived as the first-ever original and creative document, subject to further refinements as experience of its implementation pours in, what follows is the presentation of major principles that went into development of media education, facilitating direct teaching and enrichment, and quicker and low cost curricular reforms, in order to achieve rapid transformation and poverty reduction in Eritrea.

Keywords: access, equity, relevance, quality, gender parity and gender development education sector development programme, rapid educational transformation, education for all, millennium development goals, i-poverty reduction, Eritrea, Eritrean National Education Policy, media education, direct teaching, enrichment through media, formal and non-formal education, adult education, categorisation of learner groups, curricular reforms

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Widening Participation And Meta-Learning: Risking Less In He
John Bamber, Vernon Galloway and Lyn Tett University of Edinburgh

ABSTRACT
Issues of structure, exclusion and ‘choice’ mean that participation in HE is an inherently more risky, costly and uncertain exercise for working-class groups and there is a need to consider how educational cultures and practices themselves might create and perpetuate disadvantage. Active engagement in the teaching and learning process is more likely to occur when course content, tasks, activities, and vehicles for assessment systematically encourage and support meta-learning. The contention is illustrated with reference to the learning experiences of students in a course that sought to elicit and challenge takenfor- granted, often tacit, conceptions of self, work, education and the process of learning itself. The study suggests that attention to curriculum is central to the real achievement of widening access.

Keywords: exclusion and risk, non-traditional students, widening participation, active participation, valid knowledge, meta learning

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Alasdair Macintyre’S Idea Of An Educated Public And ‘Informal’ Adult Education In Scotland
Keith Hammond, University of Glasgow

ABSTRACT
Scotland has a particular history, that moves around the unique public experiences of the Enlightenment and the Act of Union as defining moments that could have developed differently. For complex reasons, public thinking moved more and more towards the fractured moral and political conditions that we know now. But, following the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, this paper argues that by re-engaging the issues of an educated public found in the early years of Scotland’s eighteenth century, the dialogic processes of adult education could still move things on to a more coherent and positive future where ‘community based’ learning could no longer be thought about as marginal. The traditions of adult education would have to be considered far more central in the recreation of an educated public and a healthy participative democracy.

Keywords: emotivism, relativism, discontinuity, enlightenment, moment of modernity, public discourse, pluralism, moral and political culture, critique
 

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