Adult Education (Essay Sample)

Adult Educational Learning : The Tutor Case Name of Student Institution Affiliation Abstract Case Evening course Adult education Class Composition : 15 elements Difference age: 22/ 58 Need to reconcile work commitments with learning activities Multifaceted cultural background We have a group of so-called mixed adult students who, in their overly varied heterogeneity, do not allow the possibility of a well-defined and unambiguous training path in its essential structure. This is the reason why it is necessary to intervene by adding to the evening classroom some professional profiles external to those ones of the ordinary class teachers. Following in-depth studies, new information has been published which supports the hypothesis that adult learning classes usually comprise individuals who want to be autonomous in their process learning, but who often need a tutor to help their growth. "The most important element for successful adult literacy and numeracy learning is to take a people-centred approach".(1) In this paper we are trying to outline, through a specific case occurred, what might be the circumstances which lead to justifying the use of a specified tutor such as a different profile from the one of the teachers who are used to committing themselves in daily classrooms. Attending evening courses in approved educational training centers means to constantly deal with a multi-varied working groups of people, flocking to the evening courses of unemployed, non-EU citizens, housewives, people who engage in undeclared workers, drop-out students and people who apart from pursuing to finish their studies and achieving a sometimes unlikely social promotion, express the clear desire for being part of an environment of socialization and communication.(2) ---------------------------- 1.Laura Bolton, 2017, cit. 'Effective adult education 2. Juan Ignacio Martínez de Morentin de Goñi, 2006, cit. 'What is adult education?' The employment prospects have significantly changed over recent years : no longer the same job activity for long periods or lifetime exists. On the contrary it happens to observe alternate phases of employment / unemployment, different jobs rotating, new areas of employment, the phenomenon of precarious work which became a visible and urgent issue, and the other circumstance of job workers redeployment in other areas of activity which tends obviously to be a slow and difficult hurdle to be overcome. Adult education is a process of lifelong education that affects all people and that prepares them for assuming social responsibilities armed with tools to develop their personality in the sphere of humane solidarity and competent abilities. There is an adult education specifically for adults; but adult education, understood in a deeper sense, is the whole of the educational system oriented towards a single aim: the achievement of being a human adult capable of exercising reason autonomously and being able to apply it on the object in question to courses providing or upgrading ICT skills. This variety of adult education.(3) Viewing the question from this perspective, the educational training for adults should be based on a flexible organizational model in which the possibility of action and support for individual learning, are to be implemented in a very specific path educational learning which take into high consideration the heterogeneous nature of the recipients. The recipients also vary according to the geographical, productive, economic and social realities in which the school comes to operate: black spots, vigorous technological and productive transformation, high or low population density, schooling, areas of social hardship, immigration. --------------------------- 3. UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2009, cit. 'Global report on adult learning educatiob' "When we speak of a comprehensive service [of adult education] we mean one that caters for all the people including those hitherto untouched by adult education. Many of them are handicapped or disadvantaged in various ways, discouraged from participating in existing provision by their own limitations and circumstances, by unsuitable premises, by a sense of their own inadequacy, by the fear of an unwelcoming bureaucracy in the administrative arrangements, or simply by the language we commonly use in describing the service".(4) In this new emerging scenario the users are much more heterogeneous than in the past, by age, places of their origins, working hours and free time, activities carried out and their duration, working conditions, family conditions, school conditions, studies conducted, skills and knowledge acquired in life and in professional experience, special needs education, expectations.(5) From this framework, it originates the necessity to use a tutor profile specifically designed to meet and satisfy specific demands in order to ensure the following below activities. This tutor profile is named a School Tutor profile and he is different from the class tutor who has assigned to him/her instead, the classical duties of a teachers in their daily classrooms. The School Tutor Profile is the new profile we are going to introduce in some specific activities of the institute for managing the characteristic variety of the people the class is comprised with. ----------------------------- 4. J.D.Turner, cit. 'The meaning of adult education', lecture delivered in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1980 5. Melanie Lenehan, 2017, in Adult Education for Inclusion and Diversity, conference Proceedings University of Edinburgh His/her activities : - school orientation - support for self-learning, - usability of adjusted routes arranged according to the characteristics and aspirations of the individual people (which can not be set apart from adult training) - segments or paths with a high overall educational value, not just to give professional and instrumental skills - flexibility of learning routes - flexible tools for training (open learning, distance learning) different from the inflexibility concerning the educational standards (below) - interaction between the business system and the training system (both rigid) - embedding of training system areas such as: companies - agencies - local authorities - guidance, mediation between the heterogeneity of needs, situations, expectations encountered during the learning process - necessary lack of flexibility at the least in of the school system as far as concerned the educational standards, and to obtain skill and competence certificates.(6) -------------------------------- 6. Katarina Popovic, 2016 'Skills and competencies for life and work – magic recipe?' in Adult Education and Development Editorial, n.83 If the variety of situations you might run into, goes in addition to the extreme heterogeneity of the recipients, in relation to the size of the evening classes and their history, an extremely varied overall picture turns out and emerges high-handedly. This variety would unfortunately endure unambiguous and decisive proposals, once for all, of very complex school issues. It goes without saying that the need for a methodological approach that assumes any proposal of tutorship as a working hypothesis experimenting it on the ground, is prone to adapt this proposal and revert it according to a logic of "learning organization"; the adult learner learns because of the awareness and the culture that he develops through his "doing". The main points of emphasis and items of special concerns which are useful and necessary for testing and trying to an experimentation of the professional profile of the School Tutor, or to reconsidering his/her crucial tasks and duties, appear to be the following ones below : a. the socio-cultural characteristics of the students of the evening classrooms b. the tendency and interest of this type of recipients for self-directed learning c. the relevance of the approach to tackling the cultural disadvantage and the linked process of the subsequent integration, as well as of a continuous progressive process of education, as a aspect where an evening classes finds its very essence. Related to these elements, the recognition of the figure of the tutor for evening classes, is an institutional figure (therefore, not extemporaneous, not episodic, not optional) that supports the effort of reinstatement, prevents further failures, helps to capitalize peculiar segments of training experiences, knowledge and skills previously gathered. School and is motivated on the basis of following additional evaluations: The adult who is essential part of the training process after his/her several motley varied life and job experiences is ready to take this decisive step for different reasons; in any case, what animates it - nor can it be otherwise - is the concrete desire for responsible participation in the formative project that the school proposes to it. The enhancement of the student's cultural and working experiences must be considered as an element of a real teaching strategy, because it takes on the background of the professionalism gained outside the school as a basis and prerequisite functional to develop targeted training paths. The enhancement of personal experiences must also be taken in consideration as a concrete way of practicing the pedagogy of success, which is always motivating for an adult student and is an antidote aimed to prevent abandonment generally favored by difficult and anxiety-inducing insertions.(7) These considerations explain the different attention and emphasis, with regard to the individual functions and purposes that identify the figure professional profile of the tutor in the evening classes compared to the daytime one. The tutoring functions of the day courses tend to be focused on "monitoring" and on the assessment/evaluation of the plans assigned to the classes in accordance with the approach and poli...