Meaning-making and meaning-making in adult learning
The five days of training have gone by incredibly fast. As I write this, Kris is being escorted by the Dean and Associate Dean of the College of Education (in the Rector’s car, no less!) to Ho Chi Minh City to catch a flight to troubled Thailand. I have greatly enjoyed working with her, and I think the group appreciated our slightly different ways of thinking and facilitating the process. Soon, she will be back stateside and able to reconstruct her regular sleeping patterns.
Yesterday, we concluded the 18th day of a three-workshop series. As in the beginning, we held to our goal of both providing a professional development experience for the participants in adult learning and program planning, and facilitating the development of an actual plan for an adult education program. This is a tricky balance that more than once fostered uncertainty and doubt in my minds. Developing ownership for both the learning and the producing of a product represents a major challenge for those of us committed to this form of adult learning and professional development, something to which the students in my problem-based learning class for adult learning would readily attest.
But this tricky balance seems even more challenging when attempted within a culture quite different from one’s own, and when the meaning of facilitation, teaching, and instructional materials are mediated through translators. Experience-based learning is inherently constructivist in nature. Our aim is to assist learners to engage the content within the context of their own experiences in a manner that contributes to their own sense of the material.
As with learners within our own society, a significant aspect of this task involves taking apart ideas in order to put them back together again in a manner that makes conceptual sense to oneself and in a way that seems to help make the concept one’s own. Within the group with which we were working with here at CTU, both Kris and I saw this process unfold repeatedly. While they were undoubtedly familiar with some of the ideas and concepts we explored with them, many of the ideas and concepts were clearly new or at least not well understood.
The language difference seems to make this meaning-making process more explicit and transparent. I have no doubts that similar struggles go on with our own students but here you can actually see the struggle manifest itself in both the translation and attempts by participants to understand what is being said. We enjoyed numerous periods within the group in which a raucous discussion broke out among the participants and, for the most part, we “participated”, as we remarked yesterday “in English” – meaning we really didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
But I now realize, after three workshops and more than 18 days of working within translated contexts with the Vietnamese, that this “meaning-making” process involved a second component. Not only where the participants seeking to conceptually understand some of our ideas, concepts, and terms. They were also struggling to find the equivalent or similar words in Vietnamese. It is hard to know what proportion of these rowdy and deep discussions reflected this second form of meaning-making, but it was apparent from the summarized translations of the discussions we would occasionally receive that they conceptually understood but struggled to find words in their language for what we were talking about. Earlier we talked about “simple” terms like goals and objectives, gap, and promotion, for which they worked to construct a word or term in Vietnamese that would effectively capture the conceptual meaning conveyed by these terms.
So our formal work concludes for the moment. I will stay on for another four weeks to be of help with continuing the work and process in any way that I can. What that involves, exactly, remains to be worked out. For now, I preoccupy myself with moving from the hotel to the “guest house” of Campus One, and learning about a whole new area of Can Tho.
The adventure continues. Stay tuned to the blog for further developments from the “Home Alone” kid.
Yesterday, we concluded the 18th day of a three-workshop series. As in the beginning, we held to our goal of both providing a professional development experience for the participants in adult learning and program planning, and facilitating the development of an actual plan for an adult education program. This is a tricky balance that more than once fostered uncertainty and doubt in my minds. Developing ownership for both the learning and the producing of a product represents a major challenge for those of us committed to this form of adult learning and professional development, something to which the students in my problem-based learning class for adult learning would readily attest.
But this tricky balance seems even more challenging when attempted within a culture quite different from one’s own, and when the meaning of facilitation, teaching, and instructional materials are mediated through translators. Experience-based learning is inherently constructivist in nature. Our aim is to assist learners to engage the content within the context of their own experiences in a manner that contributes to their own sense of the material.
As with learners within our own society, a significant aspect of this task involves taking apart ideas in order to put them back together again in a manner that makes conceptual sense to oneself and in a way that seems to help make the concept one’s own. Within the group with which we were working with here at CTU, both Kris and I saw this process unfold repeatedly. While they were undoubtedly familiar with some of the ideas and concepts we explored with them, many of the ideas and concepts were clearly new or at least not well understood.
The language difference seems to make this meaning-making process more explicit and transparent. I have no doubts that similar struggles go on with our own students but here you can actually see the struggle manifest itself in both the translation and attempts by participants to understand what is being said. We enjoyed numerous periods within the group in which a raucous discussion broke out among the participants and, for the most part, we “participated”, as we remarked yesterday “in English” – meaning we really didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
But I now realize, after three workshops and more than 18 days of working within translated contexts with the Vietnamese, that this “meaning-making” process involved a second component. Not only where the participants seeking to conceptually understand some of our ideas, concepts, and terms. They were also struggling to find the equivalent or similar words in Vietnamese. It is hard to know what proportion of these rowdy and deep discussions reflected this second form of meaning-making, but it was apparent from the summarized translations of the discussions we would occasionally receive that they conceptually understood but struggled to find words in their language for what we were talking about. Earlier we talked about “simple” terms like goals and objectives, gap, and promotion, for which they worked to construct a word or term in Vietnamese that would effectively capture the conceptual meaning conveyed by these terms.
So our formal work concludes for the moment. I will stay on for another four weeks to be of help with continuing the work and process in any way that I can. What that involves, exactly, remains to be worked out. For now, I preoccupy myself with moving from the hotel to the “guest house” of Campus One, and learning about a whole new area of Can Tho.
The adventure continues. Stay tuned to the blog for further developments from the “Home Alone” kid.
posted by John at 4:38 PM
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