ADULTS LEARNERS AND LEARNING CONTEXTS

Adults Learners and Learning Contexts



Adults Learners and Learning Contexts

Introduction

Recent investigations of adult literacy learners, as well as latest ideas of curriculum founded upon outcome from the areas of cognitive research, cognitive psychology, and artificial understanding, strengthen and even intensify the significance put upon supplying significant context in adult learning (Berryman, 1991, Freire, 1970; Knowles, 1984; Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Newman et al., 1989; Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Sterber & Wagner, 1987; U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, 1983; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986).

 

Discussion

But as Merriam and Caffarella (1999) argue, “Adult learning does not happen in a vacuum” (p. 22). In compare to psychological and behavioral understandings of learning, sociocultural forms posit that learning is not certain thing that occurs, or is just interior the head, but rather than is formed by the context, heritage, and devices in the learning situation (Brockett, 2001). One of the soonest pioneers of sociocultural learning idea was twentieth-century Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, who founded his work on the notion that all human undertakings take location in a heritage context with numerous grades of interactions, distributed convictions, standards, information, abilities, organised connections, and emblem schemes (Wertsch, del Rio, and Alvarez, 1995). These interactions and undertakings are mediated through the use of devices, either mechanical (machines, computers, calculators) or psychological (language, counting, composing, and schemes for learning), supplied by the heritage (Vygotsky, 1978, 1999). These devices double-check that linguistically conceived meanings have distributed communal meanings.

Yet eight years subsequent, the concepts of learning in context and located cognition have yet to be completely discovered and evolved in adult education (Gibson, 2002). In my outlook, it is imperative that adult teachers realise that learning can take location in numerous backgrounds and thus conceive programs that incorporate devices, context, and communal interactions with ...