WARNING! If you think adults learn like children, please read on.

Children are natural learners and their readiness to learn is rooted in biological development. Adult learners need to take a break from “doing things” before they can get into the “learning mode”. Adult learners view learning as a solution to cope with something that is impacting their immediate circumstances. For adults, learning is often sought out as a way to solve a problem or to deal better with something new. As such adult learners are “problem-centered” and want to immediately apply new information or skills to current problems or situations.

Children have a limited experience base. Adult learners have a powerful resource for the learning process: their rich life experience; and they use it actively as they continuously relate new knowledge and information to previously learned information and experiences. Unfortuately adult learners are more set in their ways, and are much more likely to reject or explain away new information that contradicts their values, beliefs and opinions. Children in turn, are open to new information and will readily adjust their views.

Unlike adult learners – children do not deal with the anxiety of the “un-learning” process and the confusion before reconstructing new knowledge. Adult learners have pride and in a classroom environment not perceived as safe or supportive major issues of self-esteem and ego tend to degenerate into conflict. Adults perceive any lack of skills or knowledge as a gap to fill as quickly as possible to defend their acquired sense of professionalism and competence.

Children do not question the learning content importance. Adults have different ideas about what is important to learn and why.

Children can be easily segmented by age when they come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, etc. Adults are very different from each other and are much harder to teach in a group as an individual entity.

Chapter 3 Overprogramming from I.Illich:Tools for Conviviality

6J (0196)
The balance of learning is determined by the ratio of two kinds of knowledge in a society. The first is a result of the creative action of people on their environment, and the second represents the result of man's "trivialization" by his manufactured milieu. Their first kind of knowledge is derived from the primary involvement of people with each other and from their use of convivial tools; the second accrues to them as a result of purposeful and programmed training to which they are subjected. Speaking the mother tongue is learned in the first way, while some pupils learn mathematics in the second. No sane person would say that speaking or walking or nursing a child is primarily the result of education, while competence in mathematics, ballet dancing, or painting usually is. 6J1 (0197)

The relation between what can be learned from ordinary living and what must be learned as a result of intentional teaching differs widely with place and time. It depends very much on rituals. All Muslims learn some Arabic as the result of prayer. This learning evolves from interaction in a context bounded by tradition. In much the same manner, peasants pick up the folk-lore of their region. Class and caste also generate opportunities to learn. The rich acquire "proper" table manners or accents and insist that these cannot be taught. The poor learn to fend in dignity where no education could teach the rich to survive. 6J2 (0198)

Crucial to how much anyone can learn on his own is the structure of his tools: the less they are convivial, the more they foster teaching. In limited and well-integrated tribes, knowledge is shared quite equally among most members. All people know most of what everybody knows. On a higher level of civilization, new tools are introduced; more people know more things, but not all know how to execute them equally well. Mastery of skill does not yet imply a monopoly of understanding. One can understand fully what a goldsmith does without being one oneself. Men do not have to be cooks to know how to prepare food. This combination of widely shared information and competence for using it is characteristic of a society in which convivial tools prevail. The techniques used are easily understood by observing the artisan at work, but the skills employed are complex and usually can be acquired only through lengthy and programmed apprenticeship. Total learning expands when the range of spontaneous learning widens along with access to an increasing number of taught skills and both liberty and discipline flower. This expansion of the balance of learning cannot go on forever; it is self-limiting. It can be optimized, but it cannot be forcibly extended. One reason is that man's life span is limited. Another-just as inexorable-is that the specialization of tools and the division of labor reinforce each other. When centralization and specialization grow beyond a certain point, they require highly programmed operators and clients. More of what each man must know is due to what another man has designed and has the power to force on him. 6J3 (0199)

The city child is born into an environment made up of systems that have a different meaning for their designers than for their clients. The inhabitant of the city is in touch with thousands of systems, but only peripherally with each. He knows how to operate the TV or the telephone, but their workings are hidden from him. Learning by primary experience is restricted to self-adjustment in the midst of packaged commodities. He feels less and less secure in doing his own thing. Cooking, courtesy, and sex become subject matters in which instruction is required. The balance of learning deteriorates: it is skewed in favor of "education." People know what they have been taught, but learn little from their own doing. People come to feel that they need "'education." 6J4 (0200)

Learning thus becomes a commodity, and, like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce. The nature of this scarcity is hidden-at a high cost-by the many forms education takes. Education can be programmed preparation for life in the future in the form of packaged, serial instructions produced by schools, or it can be constant communication about ongoing life through the output of the media and through the instructions built into consumer goods. Sometimes these instructions are attached to the item and must be read. In more thoroughly designed goods, the shape, color, and provoked associations speak to the user about the way the item must be handled. Education can also become a periodic remedy for workers whose original training gets left behind by industrial innovation. When people become obsolete and need constantly to renew their educational security, when the accountant must be reprogrammed for each new generation of computers, then learning has indeed become scarce. Educator becomes the most vulnerable and confusing issue in the society. 6J5 (0201)

Everywhere the direct cost of training rises faster than the total output. This has been interpreted in either of two ways. One interpretation assumes that education is a means to a social end. From this perspective the capitalization of man through knowledge inputs is a necessary requirement for higher productivity. The disproportionate growth rate of the educational sector means total production is nearing an asymptote. To avoid this, ways must be found to increase the cost-benefit ratio in education. Schools will be the first victims of a drive for rationalization in the production of knowledge capital. In my opinion, this is unfortunate. Although the school is destructive and quite inefficient, its traditional character protects at least some rights of the pupil. Educators freed from the restraint of schools could be much more effective and deadly conditioners. 6J6 (0202)

The second interpretation starts from the opposite assumption. According to this view, education is the most valuable output of institutional growth. The transition to a stationary state in the production of goods and perhaps even of energy will usher in an explosive growth in the production of invisible commodities such as information, education, and fun. In this argument the marginal utility of education also decreases, but this is no reason to limit its production. Some economists go even further. In the name of a misnamed quality of life they want to put the breaks on the manufacturing sector when it interferes with the growth of the service sector, seemingly unaware of the stultifying effects of escalating treatments. In neither of these two views is a distinction made between learning by the use of convivial tools and learning through manipulation. Both views skew the balance of learning by increasing manipulative teaching and crushing autonomous questions. Those who treat education as a means for production and those who treat education as the supreme luxury product agree on the need for more education. They upset the balance of learning in favor of more teaching. They assume that a modern world is inevitably so alien that it has passed beyond the reach of people and can be known only by mystagogues and disciples. 6J7 (0203)

The transformation of learning into education paralyzes man's poetic ability, his power to endow the world with his personal meaning. Man will wither away just as much if he is deprived of nature, of his own work, or of his deep need to learn what he wants and not what others have planned that he should learn. The overdetermination of the physical environment renders it hostile. Radical monopoly makes people prisoners of welfare. Men overwhelmed by commodities are rendered impotent and in their rage either kill or die. The corruption of the balance of learning makes people into puppets of their tools. 6J8 (0204)

Poets and clowns have always risen up against the oppression of creative thought by dogma. They expose literal-mindedness with metaphor. They demonstrate the follies of seriousness in a framework of humor. Their intimate wonder dissolves certainties, banishes fears, and undoes paralysis. The prophet can denounce creeds and expose superstitions and mobilize persons to use their lights and wits. Poetry, intuition, and theory can offer intimations of the advance of dogma against wit that may lead to a revolution in awareness. Only the separation of Church and State, of compulsory knowledge from political action, can redress the balance of learning. The law has been used, and can be used again, to this purpose. The law has protected societies against the exaggerated claims of its priests, and can protect it against the claims of educators. Compulsory school attendance or other compulsory treatment is analogous to compulsory attendance at a religious ritual. The law can disestablish it. The law can be used against the rising cost of education, and against the use of education in the reproduction of a class society. 6J9 (0205)

To understand the rising cost of education, we must recognize two facts: first, that nonconvivial tools create educational side effects which at some point become intolerable and, second, that education which employs nonconvivial tools is economically unfeasible. The first recognition opens our eyes to the possibility of a society where work and leisure and politics would favor learning and that could function with less formal education; the second recognition permits us to set up educational arrangements that favor self-initiated, self-chosen learning, and that relegate programmed teaching to limited, clearly specified occasions. 6J10 (0206)

Throughout the world, highly capitalized tools require highly capitalized men. Following the Second World War, economic development penetrated even "backward" areas. Spot industrialization created an intense demand for schools to program people not only to operate but also to live with their new tools. The establishment of more schools in Malaysia or Brazil teaches people the accountant's view of the value of time, the bureaucrat's view of the value of promotion, the salesman's view of the value of increased consumption, and the union leader's view of the purpose of work. People are taught all this not by the teacher but by the curriculum hidden in the structure of school. It does not matter what the teacher teaches so long as the pupil has to attend hundreds of hours of age-specific assemblies to engage in a routine decreed by the curriculum and is graded according to his ability to submit to it. People learn that they acquire more value in the market if they spend more hours in class. They learn to value progressive consumption of curricula. They learn that whatever a major institution produces has value, even invisible things such as education or health. They learn to value grade advancement, passive submission, and even the standard misbehavior that teachers like to interpret as a sign of creativity. They learn disciplined competition for the favor of the bureaucrat who presides over their daily sessions, who is called their teacher as long as they are in class and their boss when they go to work. They learn to define themselves as holders of knowledge stock in the specialty in which they have made investments of their time. They learn to accept their place in society precisely in the class and career corresponding to the level at which they leave school and to the field of their academic specialization. 6J11 (0207)

Industrial jobs are arranged so that the better-schooled fit into the scarcer slots. Scarce jobs are defined as more productive, so people with less schooling are barred from access to the more desirable goods produced in the new industries. Industrially produced shoes, bags, clothes, frozen foods, and soft drinks drive off the market equivalent goods that had been convivially produced. As production becomes more centralized and more capital-intensive, the screening process performed by tax-supported schools not only costs more for those who get through it, but double-charges those who do not. 6J12 (0208)

Education becomes necessary not only to grade people for jobs but to upgrade them for consumption. As industrial output rises, it pushes the education system to exercise the social control necessary for its efficient use. The housing industry in Latin-American countries is a good example of the educational diseconomies produced by architects. All the major cities in such countries are surrounded by vast tracts of self-built favelas, barriadas, or poblac’ones. Components for new houses and utilities could be made very cheaply and designed for self-assembly. People could build more durable, more comfortable, and more sanitary dwellings, as well as learn about new materials and systems. But instead of supporting the ability of people to shape their own environment, the government deposits in these shantytowns public utilities designed for people who live in standard modern houses. The presence of a new school, a paved road, and a glass-and-steel police station defines the professionally built house as the functional unit, and stamps the self-built home a shanty. The law establishes this definition by refusing a building permit to people who cannot submit a plan signed by an architect. People are deprived of their ability to invest their own time with the power to produce use-value, and are compelled to work for wages and to exchange their earnings for industrially defined rented space. They are deprived also of the opportunity to learn while building. 6J13 (0209)

Industrial society demands that some people be taught before they can drive a truck and that other people be taught before they can build a house. Others must be taught how to live in apartment buildings. Teachers, social workers, and policemen cooperate to keep people who have low-paying or occasional jobs in houses they may not build or change. To accommodate more people on less land, Venezuela and Brazil experimented with high-rise tenements. First, the police had to dislodge people from their "slums" and resettle them in apartments. Then the social workers had to socialize tenants who lacked sufficient schooling to understand that pigs may not be raised on eleventh-floor balconies nor beans cultivated in their bathtubs. 6J14 (0210)

In New York people with less than twelve years of schooling are treated like cripples: they tend to be unemployable, and are controlled by social workers who decide for them how to live. The radical monopoly of overefficient tools exacts from society the increasing and costly conditioning of clients. Ford produces cars that can be repaired only by trained mechanics. Agriculture departments turn out high-yield crops that can be used only with the assistance of farm managers who have survived an expensive school race. The production of better health, higher speeds, or greater yields depends on more disciplined recipients. The real cost of these doubtful benefits is hidden by unloading much of them on the schools that produce social control. 6J15 (0211)

Pressure for more and better conditioning of people in the name of education has led schools over their second watershed. Planners make programs more varied and complex, but their marginal utility thereby declines. Compulsory attendance has been extended to the point that it now can be defined by teachers as independent study on the city streets, or as a field project supervised by the weavers of Teotitl‡n del Valle. 6J16 (0212)

Parallel with the growing pretensions of school, other agencies discovered their educational mission. Newspapers, television, and radio were no longer just media of communication. They were pressed into the service of socialization. Periodicals expanded to accommodate all fit news, which meant that a few professional journalists got vast readerships, while the majority was reduced to token representation in the ""Letters to the Editor" section. 6J17 (0213)

The industrial manufacture and marketing of knowledge reduce the access of people to convivial tools for self-initiated learning Witness the fate of the book. The book is the result of two major inventions that enormously extended the balance of learning: the alphabet and the printing press. Both techniques are almost ideally convivial. Almost anybody can learn to use them, and for his own purpose. They use cheap materials. People can take them or leave them as they wish. They are not easily controlled by third parties. Even the Soviet government cannot stop the samizdat circulation of subversive typescripts. 6J18 (0214)

The alphabet and the printing press have in principle deprofessionalized the recorded word. With the alphabet the merchant broke the monopoly of the priest over hieroglyphs. With cheap paper and pencil, and later with the typewriter and modern copying devices, a set of new techniques had in principle opened the era of nonprofessional, truly convivial, communication by record. The tape recorder and camera added new media to fully interactive communication. Yet the manipulative nature of institutions and schooling for the acceptance of manipulation have put these ideally convivial tools at the service of more one-way teaching. Schools train people in the use of constantly revised textbooks. They produce readers of instructions and of news. The per capita purchase of nontechnical books by high-school graduates declines with the increased percentage of people who finish high school. More books are written for the school-trained specialist, and the self-initiated reading of books declines. More people spend more time hooked on the curriculum defined by new principals: the publisher, the producer, and the program director. Every week they wait for Time. 6J19 (0215)

Even the library has become a component of a schooled world. As the library got "better," the book was further withdrawn from the handy bookshelf. The reference librarian placed himself between people and shelves; now he is being replaced by the computer. Putting the book into huge deposits and into the hands of computers, the New York Public Library has become so expensive to operate that it now opens only from ten to six weekdays and is open only partially on Saturdays. This means that its books have become the specialized tool of readers who live on a grant to stay away from work and school. 6J20 (0216)

At its best the library is the prototype of a convivial tool. Repositories for other learning tools can be organized on its model, expanding access to tapes, pictures, records, and very simple labs filled with the same scientific instruments with which most of the major breakthroughs of the last century were made. 6J21 (0217)

Manipulative teaching tools raise the cost of learning. Now we only ask what people have to learn and then invest in a means to teach them. We should learn to ask first what people need if they want to learn and provide these tools for them. Professional teachers laugh at the idea that people would learn more from random access to learning resources than they can be taught. In fact, they frequently cite as proof for their skepticism the declining use of libraries. They overlook the fact that libraries are little used because they have been organized as formidable teaching devices. Libraries are not used because people have been trained to demand that they be taught. Neither are contraceptives, and for analogous reasons we have to explore. 6J22 (0218)

People must learn to live within bounds. This cannot be taught. Survival depends on people learning fast what they cannot do. They must learn to abstain from unlimited progeny, consumption, and use. It is impossible to educate people for voluntary poverty or to manipulate them into self-control. It is impossible to teach joyful renunciation in a world totally structured for higher output and the illusion of declining costs. 6J23 (0219)

People must learn why and how to practice contraception. The reason is clear. Man has evolved in a small corner of the universe. His world is bounded by the resources of the ecosphere, and can accommodate only a limited number of people. Technology has transformed the characteristics of this niche. The ecosphere now accommodates a larger number of people, each less vitally adapted to the environment-each on the average having less space, less freedom to survive with simple means, fewer roots in tradition. The attempt to make a better environment has turned out to be as presumptuous as the attempt to create better health, education, or communication. As a result there are now more people, most of them less at home in the world. This large population can survive because of new tools. In turn, it spurs the search for even more powerful tools, and thereby demands more radical monopoly; this monopoly, in its turn, calls for more and more education. But, paradoxically, what people most need to learn, they cannot be taught or educated to do. If they are voluntarily to keep their numbers and consumption within bounds, they must learn to do so by living active and responsible lives, or they will perish-passive though well informed, frustrated yet resigned. Voluntary and therefore effective population control is impossible under conditions of radical monopoly and overprogramming. An efficient, specialized birth control program must fail in the same way that schools and hospitals fail. It can start with a futile attempt at effective seduction. It will logically escalate to enforced sterilization and abortion. Finally, it will provide a rationale for mega-deaths. 6J24 (0220)

Voluntary and effective contraception is now absolutely necessary. If such contraception is not practiced in the very near future, humanity is in danger of being crushed by its own size rather than by the power of its tools. But this universal practice cannot possibly be the result of some miracle tool. A new practice, inverse to the present, can only be the result of a new relationship between people and their tools. The universal practice of effective contraception is a necessary premise for the limitation of tools which I advocate. But equally, the psychological inversion that will accompany a limitation of tools is a premise for the convivial psychological pressure necessary for effective contraception. 6J25 (0221)

The devices needed for birth control are a paradigm for modern convivial tools. They incorporate science in instruments that can be handled by any reasonably prudent and well-apprenticed person. They provide new ways to engage in the millenary practice of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. They are cheap enough to be made universally available. They are made to fit alternate tasks, beliefs, and situations. They are obviously tools that structure the bodily relationship of each individual to himself and to others. To be effective, some must be used by every adult, and many of them must be used every day. Birth control is an immense task. It must be accomplished within one decade. It can be accomplished only in a convivial manner. It is ridiculous to try to control populations with tools which by their nature are convivial while conditioning the population by formal education to fit more effectively into an industrial and professional world. It is absurd to expect that Brazilian peasants can be taught to depend on doctors for injections and prescriptions, on lawyers for conflict resolution, and on teachers for learning to read, while asking them to use the condom on their own. But it is equally fanciful to expect that Indian doctors will allow illiterate but well-trained hospital assistants to compete with them in the per. formance of sterilizations. If the public realized that this delicate intervention could be equally or even more carefully performed by a layman whose attention, dexterity, and programming skills were refined in the weaving of saris, doctors would lose their monopoly on all interventions which are economically feasible for any majority of people. Professional taboos and industrial tools stand and fall together once truly rational, postindustrial tools are available. Only the convergent use of convivial tools in all significant areas of need-satisfaction can render their use in each sector truly effective. Only among convivially structured tools can people learn to use the new levels of power that modern technology can incorporate in them. 6J26 (0222)

Growth as an Intimate Relationship between Learning and Unlearning

By Munir Fasheh, Arab Education Forum mfasheh@yahoo.com

A common fear I have in starting with words (for example with unlearning) is that words might become the reference, might become more real than reality as we experience it. My fear is that I might slip back into the habit I acquired in schools and universities and describe reality and my experiences, and interpret them, in a way that would fit the words rather than the other way around. In other words, my fear in starting with words is the tendency of using and applying the words in a mechanical way; i.e., to be used by the words rather than to use them. My guess is that many of the words I use today, and which I feel are full of life, would not be as powerful and meaningful as they are for me today, if I had started with them. If I have to summarise my struggle with the dominant system of knowledge, I would summarise it by saying that it has been a struggle to unlearn having words as my reference and learn to have life as my reference. My starting point has been shifting to my surroundings and experiences and being attentive and contemplative of them. By "walking this path," I came across words that I found appropriate to what I was experiencing, and to which I gave meanings that were in harmony with my experiences, reflections, convictions and circumstances. In other words, meanings grow from an existential soil (daily living, cultural, and social), and get nurtured by it, just like plants and humans grow and get nurtured from the surrounding earth soil. It is hard for me to think of growth with no soil nurturing it. Growth never starts with concepts. They might enhance it at a later stage.

What I expressed above came to my mind as I started writing about learning and unlearning (this is the first time I write about unlearning as a main theme). My mind and imagination, as usual, wandered back to dig into my life and look for instances where the word "unlearning" took place in some way, and try to find appropriate meanings for it. I quickly realized that I had diverse experiences, which naturally gave different meanings to "unlearning." Some meanings reflected uprooting people from the natural soils in which they live, while other meanings re-nurtured their connectedness to that soil.

A lot of the unlearning of the first kind is what takes place as children enter schools. Every child enters school with a lot of "knowledge" and understanding, which is anchored in the soil of daily living, which naturally includes the cultural social soil. In school, that "knowledge" and understanding have to be unlearned, ridiculed, and forgotten, and gradually be replaced by "plastic" information and knowledge, in the sense of having no roots in the "soils" in which the child lives. Such knowledge is like plastic flowers, which can be bought ready made and brought into the house and put in a vase, and become instantly part of the decoration in the house. What is worse is that they often replace pots with real soil, real flowers and real smell. Plastic flowers are much easier to acquire and much easier to take care of. Similarly, students in schools "buy" ready knowledge, which becomes instantly part of their decorative knowledge. If we teach, for example, the formula for gravity to students, they can instantly claim that they know it and can start using it! Plastic knowledge is much easier to acquire, use, and be tested on. In this sense, technical knowledge (which usually has no roots in any soil) is much easier to acquire than life-knowledge. To diagnose a child as "depressed," for example, and to prescribe an "appropriate" treatment, is much easier than creating an environment that helps change her/his mood; much easier than creating a happy environment in a home where children grow healthily. The second type of "knowledge" is something that cannot be learned from textbooks and professionals, but through living, loving, caring, and interacting with wise people.

A main perception, which I acquired at a young age (probably like others who have gone through schools and universities), is that we need knowledge and science in order to replace the "wrong" conceptions we have about the world. This may partially be true, but to leave out "knowledge" that children acquire through living (and which they come to school with) is either a sign of ignorance or lack of innocence. I don’t remember one instance where other systems of knowing (other than the one in official curricula, regardless as to whether they are decided by governments or professionals) were considered legitimate or even discussed, nor do I remember that what I came to school with was ever mentioned and considered part of knowledge or the curriculum. Professionals and officials decide the curriculum; all what students have to do is to learn what is in it, and then prove that they learned it through passing tests that are mainly verbal. No serious questions concerning the curriculum are allowed, anywhere, if they touch deeper issues, such as "Doesn’t having a curriculum hinder learning at a deeper level? Doesn’t it detach children from life? How can we justify the same content and same tests to students who are so different?" and so on and so forth. The fact that real learning takes place through interactions, experimentations, articulations, and discussions with life and with real people is usually left out. In their place, ready and polished answers, techniques, and theories are presented as the main acceptable knowledge.

The most striking experience in my life that combined learning and unlearning in an intimate and healthy way is one that I never get tired of mentioning and describing (because it never ceases to be inspiring for me) is the "discovery" of my illiterate mother’s math and knowledge. She continues to be an invincible treasure for me every time I find myself in a situation where I need to look at things from a radically different worldview. It is a fascinating story about how learning and unlearning were intertwined as integral parts of my growth and understanding. Since then, I have been busy learning in a way that included unlearning much of what I have learned in schools and universities. I have been busy, for example, healing myself from (i.e. unlearning) the assumption that thinking is superior or higher than living or doing. At the same time, I have been learning how to be attentive to my surroundings and faithful to my experiences and inner voice, and how to use words rather than be used by them.

These became main guiding principles for me in the learning-unlearning process. It is very hard for me today to think of a situation where I would learn something meaningful without unlearning being part of it, or of a situation where I am unlearning something without learning being part of it. In this sense, learning and unlearning are as intimate as the growth and death of cells in a living body. It is hard to think of a healthy body that grows without cells forming and cells dying at the same time. Similarly with growth in understanding: it embodies both learning and unlearning.

The ‘discovery’ of my mother’s knowledge ‘forced’ me to unlearn meanings that I acquired for words such as math, knowledge, literate, and illiterate, and to acquire new meanings concerning them. Unlearning ready meanings and learning new meanings represent, for me, a most crucial factor in growing. Regaining the importance, ability and habit of independent investigation of meanings of words that I hear, read and use has become increasingly a central theme in my thinking and work, and in my living in general. I say "regaining" because it has been part of the culture and civilization I was nurtured by, a part that is completely ignored by educational systems in the region. One of the fundamental and most inspiring ideas of the Islamic culture is al-ijtihad, which is the right and duty of every Muslim to put an effort in understanding the Quran. That is, meanings are never final and no person has absolute authority in terms of meanings. In my teaching and work, I have tried to embody this principle in all areas of growth and understanding. This independent investigation of meaning naturally embodies unlearning and learning as necessary ingredients in any healthy growth: unlearning ready meanings and terms, which we acquire through education, mass media, and other institutions, and learning (actually constructing) new meanings that are rooted in, and spring out from experiences, convictions, culture, and surroundings.

In addition to helping a person or a community grow, investigating and constructing meaning is most crucial to freedom, creativity, and being truthful as well as in building knowledge and understanding. In a healthy mind, the person (whether aware of it or not) is constantly forming and creating new words, new expressions, and new meanings and constantly seeing new relationships among ideas and meanings. It is a healthy mind that feels free and confident to discard dominant terms, even if experts and professionals use them (but do not make sense to the person), and feels free to radically change meanings to be more in harmony with the one’s experiences, convictions and realities. An education that does not leave room for people to independently investigate meanings is a questionable enterprise.

The realization of my "illiterate" mother’s knowledge helped me unlearn several dominant assumptions and myths and, at the same time, helped me learn new "myths" and convictions. To describe my mother as illiterate and me as literate, in some absolute sense, reflects a narrow and distorted view of the real world and of reality. [It is like describing a person who has no car as "car-less," forgetting or ignoring that s/he has legs, and focusing instead on one way of moving as being superior.] I unlearned the myth that a literate person is better than an illiterate person, that an illiterate person is not a full human being, that s/he is ignorant, that by becoming literate a person would be magically transformed and poverty and ignorance would be wiped out, that a literate person is freer than an illiterate person, and so on. On the other hand, it helped me formulate a conviction that became central in my thinking and work: that every person is a source of meaning, knowledge and understanding, and every person is logical. Becoming aware of my mother’s ways of living and knowing helped me unlearn hypocrisies that I learned in schools and universities (such as saying what teachers and professors expected me to say in order to pass their tests), and helped me learn again what I practiced as a child: to say what I mean and mean what I say (a statement that is alien to institutional logic and to career-oriented professionals). It took me several years before I was able to admit my new convictions publicly. I was simply risking my career, prestige and reputation.

I started with the idea that a big problem in being literate is substituting words for life, and considering concepts more real than reality. I struggled a lot to unlearn that concepts are more real than reality, to free myself from the hegemony and tyranny of words, from the meanings and connotations that were propagated with the words, often by design, since the values that govern the world today are winning and control. I unlearned that science and technology are neutral, objective and basically good. The catastrophes that the world seem to be marching fast towards are created mainly by literate people, fully armed with science and technology, such as polluting air, land and ocean; controlling minds; and creating tools of total destruction. Nothing, for example, has done as much irreversible harm, in terms of polluting the human body and nature, as the science of chemistry during the past 100 years!

I referred in this reflection to two types of unlearning: one that ignores what people learn from life (like what happens to children as they enter schools), and another that is related to healthy and natural growth (as opposed to cancerous growth). I find the word "growth" to be very appropriate in describing the intimate relationship between learning and unlearning. In the life of a community as in the life of a person, where there is no growth there is decay. Growth does not refer to unfolding knowledge that is already there. New understanding does not mean adding, or even discovering, something that one was not aware of before. Growth and understanding refer to new consciousness of knowledge itself, to new perception of self, to new realization that one is a co-author of meaning and a co-partner, co-creator and co-builder of life and reality. Growth and understanding refer to constant newness, not in the sense of bringing something ready from outside, but of inventing constantly new words, new meanings, new perceptions, new relationships, and new consciousness.

This implies freedom and dynamism at a level different from what they usually refer to. It often requires breaking the idols and boundaries that are set by professionals, institutions, and conventional wisdom. It is a manifestation of the integrity of creation.

Teaching is old-fashioned; Collaborative learning is state-of-the-art

We have had developments in the art of teaching adults. We have new research and ideas. So then why are we teaching people the same way we have always done? The learning research of the last 50 years keeps repeating: adults are not to be taught as kids, interactivity and learner autonomy improves learning. Why on earth are we still in the Stone Age when it comes to teaching?

Let’s be honest here: today lecturing is still the prevalent way of having adults learn. The most we can get is “interactive” lectures, which are still one-way communication based on the assumptions of an old model. When will we throw this old-fashioned model away and start from scratch? Why do we prize the latest technology for computers but despise it for adult learning and human interactions?

I am often exposed to the old-fashioned ritual of training that is still prevalent today. It does not work, at least as well as it could. Collaborative learning uses the power of a group to bring about learning. It acknowledges the latest research on adult learning that favors handing over the stick of the learning process to the learners themselves. Revolutionary? Hardly since the ideas and its supporting research has been around fro half a century. Hard to implement? Evidently.

Asking "Are there any questions?” at the end of a lecture does not change the dynamics. Why do you think people hardly ask any questions after this tip of the hat to collaboration? They have been shown throughout the lecture that their input does not count, so they do not give it. Traditional teaching is about having answers for questions. Collaborative Learning is about questioning reality and the answers that you have. Together.

Can trainers learn from Rosa Parks?

As I waited for 6 hours to pay my respect, I started thinking…
_______________________________________________________
Parks showed power of one
"Her feet were not tired. At least, no more so than usual.She always hated that legend so let us, in this, the week of her death at age 92, set the record straight. And while we're at it, let's correct another misconception: It's not precisely true that she refused to give up her seat to a white man. The seats next to her and across the aisle were empty, vacated by blacks who had heeded the bus driver's command to get up. So there were places for the white man to sit.But under the segregation statutes of Montgomery, Ala., no white man was expected to suffer the indignity of sitting next to a black woman. So driver J.F. Blake asked again. And Rosa Parks, this soft-spoken 42-year-old department store seamstress just trying to get home from work, gave him her answer again. She told him no.Her feet were not tired. Her soul was exhausted.On Dec. 1, it will be 50 years since that drama played out. Fifty years since police took her away. Fifty years since black Montgomery protested by boycotting buses. Fifty years since community leaders tapped as their leader the boyish-looking new preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.That moment in Court Square was the birthplace of the 13-year epoch called the Civil Rights Movement. You could make a compelling argument it also spawned the modern world.None of which Rosa Parks could have foreseen that December evening. All she knew was that she was tired, sick of acquiescing, accommodating, accepting foolish white laws and white people who said she wasn't good enough to occupy a bus seat. Something had gotten into her that wouldn't let her go along any more, something that turned a lifetime of yes into an electric moment of no… “
(By Leonard Pitts)
_______________________________________________

Rosa decided at one point that “no” was the right answer. It was because the limit was passed. The “no” was in reality a “yes” to those values that the civil rights movement fought so hard for.
What does this have to do with trainers? In the last few years, the ethics responsibilities of business leaders have grown significantly beyond compliance to include the mandate to build ethical cultures in organizations, where trust can grow and thrive and where employees themselves become the security network for corporate ethics. Ethics is about decision. “No” is a decision we should make sometimes.

Are trainers people of integrity? A person of integrity is one who is consistent and congruent, who “does the right thing,” even when doing so is challenging. Integrity for trainers means walking the talk, maintaining a learning attitude, and standing behind every suggestion, recommendation, and prescribed action. As hype and exaggeration permeates the training industry at a disheartening level, trainers that can say no offer a steadfast resource for effectiveness.

If I look at my work, I believe the main situation when tough choices become tinged with difficult moral dilemmas is dealing with resistance in the class.

THE POWER” IN THE CLASS
According to John Heron, in any course a trainer can manage the different aspects of Programs design, Objectives, Needs Analysis, Learning Activities etc…using three modes of facilitation: The hierarchical mode, the cooperative mode and the autonomous mode.

In hierarchical mode the trainer directs the learning process, exercises power over it, does things for the group, manages group feelings, provides structures for learning.

In the cooperative mode power over the learning process is shared: the trainer enables and guides the group to become more self-directing in the various forms of learning, helping group members to decide on the program, to give meaning to experiences, to do their own confrontation, and so on. The trainer’s views, though influential, are not final but one among many.

In the autonomous mode the trainer does not do things for the group, or with them, but gives them freedom to find their own way, exercising their own judgment without any intervention on the trainer’s part. It is the subtle art of creating conditions within which people can exercise full self-determination in their learning.

A trainer should be explicit about which mode he or she is in and learn to be flexible in moving from mode to mode in light of the changing situation in the group. Regardless, we should thank the Rosa Parks in our classes! Thank God they resist!

THE “POWER OF NO” in the CLASS

Real learning takes time and effort. When training for lasting change, let’s deal with resistance in organizations with curiosity and open communication. Before trying to convince someone, let’s learn more. A great way to learn is to explore people's responses — especially the responses that strike you as resistance. Every response carries valuable information, clues about the work, the worker, the workplace or about what we are “really” trying to do to people. It can help us maybe by changing the mode we should operate.

We should actively encourage active discussion, questioning and challenging. This Socratic approach to learning makes for great explorations and for a much more thorough, stimulating and enjoyable learning experience that the learn-from-the-wise-one approach. Simply because some 'authority figure' says something is true doesn't make it so - intelligent learning requires that everything is tested and thoroughly challenged! So trainers need to encourage trainees to discuss, question, and challenge.

OTHER IDEAS TO INCREASE RESISTANCE

Let them out-number and plot against you! Consider Ken Blanchard's comment: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” The work needs to happen in learning teams in which we draw upon the skills and experiences of everyone taking part in the training. Small learning teams are friendlier, less inhibiting, and engender a higher degree of inter-personal respect. The benefits of this 'learning team' approach are quite remarkable and have to be experienced to be fully appreciated.

Learning hurts! I think we should never hide that it takes time and error to learn. Get the essentials on applying the knowledge - and you recognize the potential for further exploring each topic after the training.Leave them alone! Let them think for themselves and make their own discoveries. What's more, nothing is 'sacred'; everything is open to challenge and discussion. We need to refuse to cram hoards of people into our courses - even though doing so would be more profitable - because to do so would reduce the quality of the learning experience - and the quality of the fun the trainees will have.

Doing. Period. Learning a skill is not accumulating information. It is behavioral rather then intellectual. Trainers should respect people’s intelligence, integrity and individuality. Never talk at them or provide trainees with pre-digested ideas-to-be-absorbed. Get trainees 'hands on' with what they are learning through practical exercises, activities, reviews, and games.

So in summary: freedom to your learner is job number one. Your challenge: you may have to get out of their way, they may have to disagree with you. It looks like is bad but it is good. Really.

"Knowledge in the age of abundance" by D. Weinberger

Kindly written by David Weiberger in the run up to his keynote speech at the Online Information conference in London, 29 November 2005.

Knowledge management arose because too much information is the same thing as noise. The aim of KM became to sift through the dross, finding the genuine nuggets of value.
Thus did KM go wrong from the beginning. The main problem with this line of thought is that it fears abundance. It even gets the basic premise wrong: Too much information isn’t noise. It’s possibilities.

It sounds like noise if you take a narrow view of how we come up with ideas and make decisions. That view looks at the last step of the process, notices that only 0.000001% of the available information was useful, and thus assumes what wasn’t useful got in the way. If it’s noise, the thinking goes, then it disrupts signal.

But does our signal get disrupted? When you’re doing a search on Google, all those millions of hits that are of no use to you can count as noise. But if Google (or your search engine of choice) puts what you need in the top ten, those other hits are “silent noise.” So long as we’re finding what we need, the noise doesn’t get in our way. And we are far better at finding what we need than even Information Retrieval experts imagined ten years ago.

Nevertheless, the existence of all that irrelevant information makes problems. It’s not always easy to find what you need. So, KM imagined that we could find a special class of information, a type of “super information,” that would be to information as information is to data. This super information would be a corporate asset of tremendous value.But knowledge generally doesn’t work that way. Knowledge is not an identifiable special class of information that is a corporate asset. Assets can be identified by looking at their properties: If it’s gold, it yields when you bite it. If it’s a diamond, it scratches glass. Super information, on the other hand, only becomes super within difficult-to-predict circumstances. For example, that the game Doom 3 handles lighting better than does Half Life 2 is noise until the moment someone in the organization needs to find a way to mock up an event that depends on lighting effects. There is no way in advance to determine that the IM spat between two engineers over which game’s lighting is better is knowledge. Knowledge isn’t like a diamond. It’s more like a piece of twisted metal in a junkyard that suddenly takes on value because it happens to match the hole in your roof.

The new abundance has its own logic, its own physics, and its own benefits. But it’s hard for KM to shake off its old impulse to manage that which is unmanaged. You can see this attitude in the comforting phrase “Delivering the right information to the right people at the right time,” a line that is used with surprising frequency by people in the KM industry. “Delivering the right pizzas to the right people at the right time” makes total sense for your local Italian restaurant. But it is highly misleading when it comes to knowledge. It actually gets it backward. For the truly difficult decisions - the ones where you need knowledge not just some facts and stats - the information that is delivered to the decision-maker does not determine the decision. Rather, in making the decision, the person decides which information counts, and how much it counts. Should you open up a new office? Should you agree to the terms of a partnership? Should you change your product focus? These are all questions that are not decided by information so much as by the decision about which information to count. A KM system can’t deliver the right information to the right person because the right person’s main value is in deciding which is the right information. The KM system does its job in part by delivering lots and lots of possibilities and open ways to explore the never-ending sea of ideas and information.

This means that in many circumstances we have to give up the idea that there is such a thing as the best information. In an age of abundance, it becomes easier to get good enough information and harder to get the best. But good information is, well, good enough. We don’t have time to get the absolute best information. Besides, with so much information available, how could we ever know that we’re getting the best information? The concept makes less and less sense.
Besides, knowledge is overrated. In a world of information abundance, much knowledge has been commoditized: Anyone can find out anything by using a search engine. Knowledge has been externalized, just as calculators externalized arithmetic.There’s still plenty to do to become smart, though. We just can no longer be smart by stuffing our heads with information, even if it’s the right information at the right time. Now that it’s so easy to lay our hands on the right information, we’re smart only if we can make sense of what we learn.

How do we do this? We can’t do it alone. We never could, and now life is so complex and there’s so much to know, that solitary smartness is quickly becoming a thing of the past. So we do what we always have: We make sense of information by talking with other people. We need rich relationships with diverse people. We need gnarly conversational networks. We need to get smart together. And talk is how we do it. That’s also how we come up with new ideas. At least as important, it’s how we quickly find out that bad ideas are bad.

Organizations succeed at getting smart through conversation not by managing conversation but by facilitating its unruly growth. You never know who is going to talk with whom and what crazy – or insanely profitable – idea is going to grow out of it.

Then the management instinct inevitably re-asserts itself. The little management devil on our shoulder suggests that we set up a system by which we can “harvest” conversations. In fact that system is already in place. Good ideas get passed around in hallways, emails, weblogs even formal memos. We together are not only the best source of ideas, we’re also the best filter for them. We’ll figure out how to surface the ones worth pursuing. If a KM system wants to give us some help publishing what makes it way through our social, conversational filter, great. But Conversation Management would be a truly counter-productive idea.

The traditional tools of KM all have their place, from advanced search engines, to taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, to skill matching systems, to conceptual analysis, and all the rest. But they are without real value if they aim first at individuals, rather than at building a culture abuzz with talk. They are of negative value if they aim at primarily limiting vision rather than opening possibilities.

Knowledge is the loam of possibility.

By D.Weinberger

A book I am reading: "PARTICIPATORY WORKSHOPS" by Robert Chambers

Participation?

A word that we hear and see at every stage. But what does the word participation actually imply? What are these so called participatory approaches?

The main principle:every individual, poor or rich, man or woman has the capacity to analyse his/her own reality and take action based on this analysis. Away from the notion that "we" know best - the trainers - and have something to offer to "them".

The main question that had to be addressed was "Whose reality counts?" in the end. Ours or theirs?

PRA & PLA Techniques

In order to obtain a greater understanding of the reality of the people, and involve them in the entire project cycle, a set of tools known as PRA/PLA techniques was developed. (PRA = Participatory Rural Appraisal; PLA = Participatory Learning and Action)

Robert Chambers describes PRA as "a family of approaches, behaviors and methods for enabling people to do their own appraisal, analysis and planning, take their own action and do their own monitoring and evaluation." (Chambers, Participatory Workshops, 2002)

The methods are open ended, participatory, and often visual as well as verbal. PRA processes have facilitated the process of development in many contexts, rural as well as urban.
As trainers, our main role in the use of participatory approaches is that of facilitators. Good facilitation and empowering others demands action, reflection, learning and change, which are continuous.

A few important Do's and Don'ts of facilitation that have been listed by Robert Chambers in his book Participatory Workshops which are useful reminders for all of us engaged in the process of teaching adults.

DON'T

rush
lecture
criticize
interrupt
dominate
sabotage
take yourself too seriously

DO
use your own best judgment at all times
introduce yourself, establish rapport
respect, be nice to people
handover the stick
watch, listen learn
embrace error, learn from mistakes
unlearn, abandon preconceptions
be self aware and self critical
be honest
innovate and invent
try new things, be bold take risks

The sad status of IT Training

Everybody around me is lost. We’ve been sitting here for five hours now. The trainer has no intention of doing anything but talking. She keeps repeating “Ok? So far so good?”
She asked us not to touch the computer while she talks. I’m stuck. What do I do? People seem to be listening. Are they mad? Am I? Not at all. Maybe they don’t know there’s a better way. In the meantime they sit here. For five hours… In silence, assumedly learning.

My mind start rambling again and this time with a hint of outrage: we’re nine professionals with little extra time on our hands and it’s being wasted. Am I oversensitive or she is insulting our intelligence? Good heavens, she just repeated, “Ok? So far so good?” I may explode.

The question someone asked earlier was answered “We’re not there yet.” Instead, I feel she is not where we are. Maybe she wasn’t given enough information about us, our level of proficiency. Maybe it’s not her fault. Is she part of the problem or part of the solution? In the meantime I need to learn these skills for my job; I try to concentrate.

Now we’re supposed to do an exercise. I don’t know which page we’re at. Shall I ask? Everyone is silent and I don’t know the name of the person sitting next to me. Here I am, feeling lonely in the middle of ten people. She said the software is a “different paradigm.” What’s a paradigm doing in our training? She talks about her work. One trainee started small talk totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I flip through the pages of the thick manual she gave us. She starts talking again. I wonder when I will learn this…Now she’s talking on the cellphone during a break. Did I hear her saying that “Training is going well?”

I keep clicking on the desktop and decide to give it a try. I manage to do something. Will it be right? Am I totally off? Maybe she really convinced me that I don’t have what it takes to learn this. Didn’t she mention earlier that she’s been using this for ten years? Or 20? Maybe 30! Maybe this class is not for my level…I forget what I should do.

She asked us to do another exercise after she talked about the best way to search. I hear her saying to someone that it will take time for us to learn this. Is this true? Then I should start as soon possible. She asked if anyone has questions. I wouldn’t know where to begin. All I’m sure about is what I’ll write on the evaluation form: “There was a person constantly talking and disrupting the class. Unfortunately, that person was the instructor.”.

Group dialogue does not just happen.

In my opinion, working with a group is a skill, something that does not come by itself. The evidence to this statement is the fact that not all communication going on during meetings is productive communication. Not all communication going on during meetings is conversation.

In a normal working day we may face conversations of type A, B or C

Type A Conversation (A stands for Antagonistic) , meaning conversations that can't seem to move beyond conflict

Type B Conversation (B stands for Banal), meaning conversations which feel oppressive, boring, or depressing, This might happen because participants are trying to avoid conflict, intimacy, or surprises, or it might just be habit. (Common examples are extreme politeness, tightly-controlled meetings, and alienated marriages.)

Type C Conversation (C stands for Creative), meaning conversations that engage people's diversity creatively to generate greater shared understanding.

Harrison Owen said once : "Dialogue is people truly listening to people truly speaking." When we all truly speak and truly listen, we can't help but generate greater shared understanding.

The one we need for a successful coalition-building effort. At that point conversation enlarges and possibly changes a participant's point of view rather than affirms a participant's own point of view.
We know this much: if people are involved in C type conversations problem gets solved, business gets done ! If only we could make every conversation a creative one. Would it be great ?

The Bad news is that we can not force people into participation or creativity. People are by their nature free to really listening or not, free to really talking or not. Hidden agendas get in the way……

Authentic Participation – like good friendship - can not be forced. Conversation is shared exploration towards greater understanding, connection, or possibility. Unfortunately we know that conversations do not just happen. So the full participation and the greater connection that we want to use to solve a problem turns into “the problem”.

So we end up with our original problem plus this new one: how to engage people. A problem we tackle in a group everyday on top of an agenda to accomplish and a job to get done. Often with deadlines looming.

HOW TO WRITE GOOD!

I have found this on-line. It is so much fun that I would like to put it on my blog! Hope you enjoy it.

1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
8. Be more or less specific.
9. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually)unnecessary.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Contractions aren't necessary and shouldn't be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's
highly superfluous.
14. One should never generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
16. Don't use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words
however should be enclosed in commas.
23. Kill all exclamation points!!!
24. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth
earthshaking ideas.
25. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not
needed.
26. Eliminate famous quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate
quotations. Tell me what you know."
27. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Resist
hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it effectively.
28. Puns are for children, not for groan readers.
29. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
30. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
31. Who needs rhetorical questions?
32. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
And finally...
33. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Designing Change or Start Designing Conversations?

When change is designed in an organization, there is an assumption that someone somewhere knows better or more than someone else. When we design conversations, we create the space for change to emerge without directing it—it occurs as a result of ownership derived from knowledge and connection to what really matters. Change actually emerges from there. This space — not mine, not yours, but ours — is less threatening, less directive and more representative of a mutual ownership and commitment to what is required.

In an era where everybody is as intelligent as everyone else, no one anywhere knows better or more than people inside the organization. In order to create continuous learning, we need a stable platform of processing increasing complexity and ambiguity. The platform created through conversations is the foundation for organizational agility — the capability to adapt readily and willingly to rapid change and uncertainty.

In essence, the key missing ingredient in all models derived from mechanical or inorganic methods of viewing business reality, are the connections that have to occur between the component parts.

Everyone in organizations today needs to be involved in strategic conversations —conversations from and with all perspectives. The person most efficient and trained to create that conversation is a facilitator. The facilitator helps to forward the integration of personal and business reality.

To produce organic change, which is far less costly over time than top-down change, we must allow leadership (learning and teaching capabilities) to carry the weight of change through effective conversations and interactions.

The design is not about change. The design is about creating a system to carry the continuous natural adaptation — to support discontinuous change - through connected conversations around what really matters.

Is Dialogue Education subversive teaching? Yes it is!

I am reading this book and I want to share the power of it!

Almost 30 years ago, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner wrote a book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. This book is about subversive teaching, the conscious act of teaching with the "inquiry method". It pull heavily from Marshall McCluhan’s work around the idea that the medium is the message, and that merely labeling ideas ("Oh, this is just the discovery method") diverts our attention from the complex processes that are at work.

They explain:
"The inquiry method is not designed to do better what older environments try to do. It works you over in entirely different ways. It activates different senses, attitudes, and perceptions; it generates a different, bolder, and more potent kind of intelligence. Thus, it will cause teachers and their tests, and their grading systems, and their curriculum to change. It will cause college admissions requirements to change. It will cause everything to change." (1969,p. 27)


In contrast to a "production" approach to teaching, the inquiry method focuses on the process, rather than the product. Thus, a good teacher is one who realizes the "answers" are not in the books, but within the learners themselves. Doing and experiencing are the key ingredients to real learning, and how and what we learn does not happen sequentially and especially does not happen for all learners in the same way at the same time.

A subversive teacher, then, is one who firmly realizes these "truths" about learning. Despite the system’s focus on product (predetermined curriculum and test scores), the subversive teacher actively attempts to redesign the structure of the classroom to focus instead on process. Some of the attitudinal characteristics of such "teachers in action" as listed by Postman & Weingartner include:

The teacher rarely tells students what he thinks. Generally, he does not accept a single statement as an answer to a question.
He encourages student-student interaction as opposed to student-teacher interaction, generally avoids acting as a mediator or judging the quality of ideas expressed.
He rarely summarizes the positions taken by students on the learnings that occur. He recognizes that the act of summary or "closure" tends to have the effect of ending further thought.Generally, each of his lessons pose a problem for students.
His lessons develop from the responses of students and not from a previously determined "logical" structure. (Postman & Weingartner, 1969, p. 33-36)


The relationship they describe between teaching and meaning seems to go at the depth of the work of every educator.

"As soon as students realize that their lessons are about their meanings, then the entire psychological context of schools is different. Learning is no longera contest between them and something outside of them, whether the problem be a poem, a historical conclusion, a scientific theory, or anything else. There is, then, no need for the kinds of "motivation" found in the conventional Trivia content. There are few occasions for feelings of inadequacy, few threats to their sense of dignity, less reason to resist changing perspectives. In short, the meaning-maker metaphor puts the student at the center of the learning
process. It makes both possible and acceptable a plurality of meanings, for the
environment does not exist only to impose standardized meanings but rather to
help students improve their unique meaning-making capabilities. And this is the
basis of the process of learning how to learn, how to deal with the otherwise
‘meaningless,’ how to cope with change that requires new meanings to be made."
(p. 97)



Mr. Postman, Mr Weingartner: thank you so much!

Too much HOW for the WHAT!

I attended the Dialogue Education Institute conference in Chapel Hill last week where I had the privilege to embark in an exciting learning journey on Dialogue Education with a group of incredible human beings.
During those days I jotted down some memorable quotes in my journal.



On the need for teacher's integrity:
“The hurt of a teacher is more damaging than the hurt of a farmer!”

On discovering Jane’s work and finally being able to express previously intuitively held concepts: “There is language for this!”

On identity: “I am a natural learner. It comes from my own needs”

On a book to be written for teachers: “How to avoid answering an open question”

On reflection: “How do we think about what we do and whether we think it or not?”

On the difficulty in doing learning needs assessment: “How do you assess the need that is not expressed?”

On having fun when learning: “Is content an excuse to get together?”

On the work of the teacher: “All we do is unfreezing!”

On dealing with the ‘Professor’: “Ignore the teacher. It will go away!”

On the need for action: “Unless we do it, we are not doing it”

On the real work of the teacher: “We do not teach Math, we teach people”

On a possible label for Dialogue Educators: “The positive deviants”

On learning objectives set up by the ‘Professor’: “At the end of the course… you will know what this course is all about!”

On autonomy: “How can students be subject of their own learning if all we ask them to do is following our instructions?”

On Teaching and talking: "I got the privilege to be the Big Mouth"

On Peace: "If you want to be my enemy you have your work cut out for you"

On Dialogue Education: “Dialogue Education: the artful dance between flow and structure in the building of shared meaning”

CONSENSO e PARTECIPAZIONE: conversazione con un amico

Carissimi,

Per quanto riguarda il moderatore esterno io lascerei perdere, soprattutto se gli altri non si sono ancora dichiarati favorevoli.
Credo che l'intrusione di un esterno possa inibire o rendere ancora meno partecipata la discussione, che secondo me deve restare a livello di una chiacchierata fra amici. Le opinioni sul che fare(?) devono fluire spontanee e appassionate, devono dare la misura della differenza e divergenza, nonche' delle possibili convergenze.

Solo cosi' infatti si potrebbe riuscire a costruire qualcosa di valido e partecipativo, ma non deve essere un dramma se tutte queste chiacchiere si dovessero concludere con un nulla di fatto: amici come prima, anzi piu' di prima.

E' per questo che penso che il moderatore deve essere uno di noi e xxxxxx resta il mio candidato. Gli suggerisco di organizzare gia' le domande in maniera evolutiva concedendo un tempo preciso e limitato per le risposte (compresa la sua).
Dovra' inoltre proibire ed evitare le interruzioni, evitare o tenere a freno gli eccessi verbali dei piu' agitati e tenere conto dell'evoluzione del dibattito per 60 minuti.

Le valutazioni circa le possibilita' di giungere ad una conclusione unitaria, come sulla possibilita' di giungere alla costruzione di un gruppo omogeneo che lavora insieme su un progetto comune non possono essere delegate o lasciate ad un moderatore esterno, come non possono essere lasciate solo a xxxxxxx.

Buona notte a tutti.


LA MIA REPLICA

Spontanee e appassionate? Come l'altra volta? Ma si, una bella chiacchierata tra amici. Porto io i tarallucci e il vino...

"L'intrusione di un esterno possa inibire" ? In che senso? I piu' agitati? Il facilitatore non e' un maestro di scuola che fa la lista dei buoni e dei cattivi ma un professionista che crea le condizioni migliori per aumentare la partecipazione. Ti posso consigliare di leggere qualche articolo da questo sito?
http://www.iaf-world.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1

Il gruppo non sta preparando una chiacchierata fra amici. Guarda che per la maggior parte dei partecipanti - me incluso - gli altri membri sono qualsi estranei, visti una volta o due. Forse parli per te. E gli altri?

"XXXXXX resta il mio candidato": quando non siamo d'accordo - perche e' evidente che non lo siamo - scatta subito il meccanismo del voto invece di quello della ricerca del consenso. Perche? Non so se ho ragione e credo che ognuno abbia un pezzo di verita'. Io non sono interessato ad avere ragione, solo ad esplorare insieme quale sia la cosa piu' giusta.

Ho fiducia. Ma devo dirti che trovo ridicolo - a 3000 km di distanza - continuare questo modello "conflittuale" a colpi di mozioni e di "votazioni - muro contro muro" con lo spettro dello scioglimento, visto che metti sempre in dubbio "la possibilita' di giungere ad una conclusione unitaria".

Io sono per il dialogo. Un gruppo di 10 persone che condividono la stesse idee politiche che vivono a Washington, che hanno un minimo di buon senso e di buona educazione, possono mettersi d'accordo.

XXXXXX e' il mio candidato? Credevo fosse una conversazione... tra amici. Ma non c'e bisogno del voto: visto che XXXXXX si e' offeso, il facilitatore non l'ho piu' chiamato.

Adriano Pianesi


CONTRO REPLICA

Caro Adriano,

voglio rispondere alla tua "provocazione" non solo per la piccola divergenza d'opinione sul moderatore/facilitatore, ma soprattuto per informarti che ho recepito il tuo messaggio, nonche' per darti il segnale piu' chiaro possibile che ho capito benissimo la tua decisione e volonta' di fare del tutto per far funzionare il nostro gruppo.

Tuttavia, credo che il facilitatore non possa fare molto per favorire l'amicizia e per far maturare il consenso, soprattutto se qualcuno ritenesse che non e' il caso di accettare mediazioni e compromessi.

Al nostro livello il consenso deve arrivare spontaneo. Inoltre, ognuno e' libero pensare e decidere su cosa vuole fare. E, noi, soprattutto in questo caso, dovremmo rispettare chi non vuole o non se la sente di aderire ad un'iniziativa di cui non e' convinto.

Un abbraccio.

RISPOSTA ALLA CONTRO REPLICA

Carissimo;
Grazie della tua mail. Si, la pensiamo diversamente. Hai visitato il sito che ti ho mandato?
Il facilitatore non ha il compito di "favorire l'amicizia" (ma a mio avviso l'amicizia in un meeting non c'entra. E' come fare un business con un amico: o finisce l'amicizia o il business!).

A mio pare il consenso non e' dato una volta per tutte. Io credo che chiarendo le ipotesi e i fatti, le esperienze di ognuno sia possibile arrivare - se non a cambiare opinione - a capire le prospettive di chi non la pensa come me. Credo che questo crea le condizioni per trovare un accordo.

"Al nostro livello il consenso deve arrivare spontaneo." Questo io non l'ho mai sperimentato nella mia vita. Mi piacerebbe saperne di piu' della tua esperienza di CONSENSO SPONTANEO.
Nel nostro gruppo ho notato che tutti hanno un’opinione su tutto - prima di cominciare a parlare - che ritengono la piu’ giusta. Un'altro modo di chiamarlo e' PREGIUDIZIO. Ho notato pure molta diffidenza.

Il rispetto di chi vuole uscire o la liberta' di farlo non e' mai stato in dubbio. Lo e' il "come" creare le condizioni perche' questo non succeda:
A tuo parere non abbiamo modo di influire ed il risultato puo’ essere l’uscita di alcuni.
A mio parere invece si puo’ evitare l’uscita attraverso lavoro di gruppo produttivo e strutturato che mantenga il paradosso della maggiore struttura possibile per creare ...spontaneita'.

Scusami per la lunga mail.
In spirito di collaborazione

Adriano Pianesi

Friends, Mafia and Values a.k.a. You are wrong!

What is the utimate test of character? When things are fine and when they are not? What is really worth sacrifice? Are we alone or we belong? Are we to search meaning or happiness, or what? Here is a story for you, my friend! Hope it helps you figure it out.

Will is the marshall of a small western town in 1870. He’s just retired and he is waiting for the new marshall to get into town. He has been waiting for a week now but no news has come from the district office of Abilene about when Dan, the new marshall, will get in town.

Will is getting married to Amy. They are planning to move to another town, open a small store and have a family.

In the middle of their wedding party, word comes that Mitch - a killer Will sent to jail - has been pardoned by Judge Roy and is due to arrive in town on the train at noon.

Amy is a quaker and hates violence. She wants her husband to leave town with her before the killer arrives. “You should think about what is at stake here, Will” she said to Will in her wedding gown. “I can not help you: it is against my religion to use violence”

Bob, the city mayor is advicing against the decision to create a posse to defend the town: “They are only after Will. If he leaves town no blood will be shed and we will be safe. Will, this is the new marshall problem’s not yours”.

“I believe I will be leaving town as a precautionary measure” said Judge Roy hearing that the killer was to be in town.

Will asked Frank, his closest friend to help him. “There will be no shame in leaving” said Frank, “You have already turned your badge last week. This is the best advice I can give and the best I can do. I have a family.”

It’s 10:40 a.m. The train platform is deserted except for some of the killer’s cohorts, who are waiting for him to arrive. Together they plan to kill the marshall. Will has no chance, and there is no one left in town to help.

In case he gets killed, how would you rank the responsibility of all the characters in this story?

Audience Analysis

In the training company where I used to work, at the beginning of a three-day class we asked participants to put themselves in one of three
categories—a prisoner, a vacationer, or a learner, based on how they view themselves relative to the session.

A prisoner is someone who has been sent by management and personally doesn’t see the need to attend.

A vacationer is the person who says, “I can chill out in this class! I really don’t need to work. I’ll just come to the workshop and do other
work.”

A learner, on the other hand, is someone who truly desires to gain new skills and knowledge and grow personally and professionally.

It happens sometimes that all the participants are prisoners and do not want to be there (sounds familiar?).

Here are a few points that can help you manage a class of “prisoners”:
§ What may have caused the workshop participants to all feel like prisoners?
§ What could you have done earlier in the workshop to get people to be willing to engage?
§ What do you need to make clear to others so that they can choose whether or not to engage in a training session?

When you have a resistant audience you need to name what’s going on in the room and tell the truth about how you are experiencing it.

You also need to give people choices. In my experience, when given a choice about applying themselves, most people are “willing to work”because they want to do what’s right.

Training Checklist

TRAINER’S CHECKLIST

o Informed Manager about training initiative.
o Identified how many people need training.
o Decided how we are giving them training (Classroom session, Small groups Demo, One-on-One, Selfinstruction, etc…).
o Selected Lab exercises to teach.
o Send an e-mail to all people attending the training to inform them of the session’s time/place.
o Collect Labs booklets needed for session.
o Reserved room for classroom session or set up space for one-on-one (pulling one chair may not be
enough!).
o Verified User ID to use in the training.
o Tested links and user ID in the room before class (possibly not the same day of training).
o Brought markers, posters and training materials in the class.
o Prepared poster for questions I am not able to answer.
o Left “controlling” attitude behind and shifted into a “giving” attitude.

Talking ain't Training

Which of the two scenarios will you follow when you train for Systems Training
in your office?

In one image, an instructor using a PowerPoint presentation focuses on the overhead,
reading it verbatim and adding a few personal comments. With military precision he repeats
the drill, proceeding to the next overhead -- about 50 times.
As half of the 20 participant's eyes glaze over, the presenter rambles on. He seems to be
addressing his projector -- not us. A book – you would say, give me a book or some good
documentation to read, I would learn as much as I am getting from this.

In the other image, a smiling instructor energizes the group with simple, open questions
that stimulate thought and generate generous discussion.
In opening a topic she asks, "What does this word, (or concept) mean to you?" "Why is this
subject important to you?" She ends segments with "How can you use this information back
at work?" Relevant, interactive, engaging -- these are a few of the comments we write in our
post-course evaluations.

Both presenters are obviously intelligent. They know their subjects cold.
Caring people, they seem driven by a passion to share their knowledge with
us. Clearly, both have spent long hours preparing their materials.
Trouble is -- the first presenter does not reach his audience. Good intentions
are buried under a stack of carefully-worded PowerPoint slides. "Teachingoriented"
is to "tell" the class what the teacher knows.

In the second scenario, "Learning-oriented", the instructor leads learners on
the first leg of a journey. She helps her audience identify their personal
relationship to the subject -- identify "what is in it for me." Or how can I use
this information in my work?