Week 4 Group Discussion Board Summary

The week started off well.  Nick acted as our facilitator and posted 4 questions for us to select 3 to answer - listed below. I took the role of scribe and LaKrisha took the role of analyst.

1. How can a historical foundation be beneficial to all who engage in the education of adults?
2. Why are social movements and adult education interdependent on each other?
3. What benefits does a social movement bring to both the community and adult education?
4. From The Profession and Practice of Adult Education, compare and contrast the different types of historical interpretation. How does understanding these interpretations benefit adult education?

I appreciated having the option of selecting three from the list to dive into. LaKrisha and I both selected the first question dealing with the benefits of understanding the historical foundations.  We looked at both adult education in general as well as an institutions history.  The bottom line was that we must get to the root of where these decisions and institutional pathways began in order to understand where they are today.  This will also help us in looking to the future.

We both focused on social movements and adult education being interdependent on each other.  I gave a brief breakdown of the movements in the Rewriting the History of Education article. LaKrisha made a good point that social movements cause people to look at the “why” of their actions and beliefs.  She said, “They become positively inquisitive.” I think this is a great way to think about next level thinking.

Nick continued to push us to next level thinking ourselves throughout the week by asking us to dive deeper in response back to each one of our replies.  And I believe we did just that.  It definitely turned into more of a back and forth than traditional discussion boards by Nick asking us to go a step further.  He did a great job of connecting the original questions to the reading and even more so in his follow up questions even bringing in material from last week connecting to prior learning in the course.

When LaKrisha was speaking to the benefits of a social movement to a community Nick asked, “Do you think formal adult education programs should be more active in teaching social movement learning, similar to what Myles Horton did in Tennessee with the Highlander Folk School, or is a social movement more of an informal education environment?” This is a great example of connecting the dots through the course.

Social movements do benefit adult and community education. These both fulfill a need.  Institutions were built to fulfill the need to educate the population.  Social movements are what continue to change the world of education.  Individual student needs as well as collectivistic needs of the community and workforce continue to shape the world of academia. LaKrisha gave a real world example of social movement calling for change with a program her organization uses called Getting Ahead.  While I attempted to give some advice in building buy in from certain cultures we were reminded that this can be difficult without additional resources and in this can money to pay graduates of the program to return to help in some way.