Access to HE courses provide a bridge towards Higher Education particularly to take account of non-traditional and delayed educational experience. Student ages are rising, there are more women involved and diversity of backgrounds. In such students, many being adults, there are a number of blockages to learning to be considered. |
On an intellectual level:
Such learners have indirect, maybe direct but long ago, experiences of subject acquisition that now enjoys an emotional capital that produces blocks to learning. Thee are many assumptions built up, and these exist as:
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Learning in subjects provides such people with intellectual challenges to their emotional capital, for which their negative responses can be:
For such students this learning is highly threatening. If new knowledge is railroaded through, there is a danger of switching off and evasion, and over time a lack of interest in taking the subject up at Higher Education level. |
The teaching strategy must be to find the assumptions already in existence and to bring about unlearning, the unlearning carried out by asking how the old views came about and why do they become entrenched. So the teaching needs some detective work, and to take the students as experienced, for them to deliver what they apparently know in order to address these matters. |
There are other forms of frustrations with learning:
All these question the priority given by a student to learning. Crunch points can be exams: the preparation with time needed and the doing of them. All this can be summarised as: |
Anxiety |
Anxiety has negative effects upon:
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So what students in this situation need is the confidence-buildingsetting to evaluate their views and those expressed by the teacher. The teacher therefore needs sensitivity:
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However, such is not enough. The students need to develop, using these teaching and learning techniques:
These have the effect of building abstract learning skills, where the mind makes connections around hypotheses. All this is so that students develop:
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Some students start off well and enthused, but lose this, in a condition that might be called... |
Early Arousal |
The early enthusiasm just drains off. The subject is different from and more complex than was thought to be the case at application. |
A mistake here is for the teacher to claim that the subject matter is easy. If it is said to be easy, and it is perceived otherwise, then the loss of enthusiasm is potentially made worse. |
The pain and shame of potentially failing leads to:
A desire arises for:
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Parrot learning is a defeat for understanding, whatever may be the repetition achieved. What must not happen regarding both anxiety and early arousal is:
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Why this is a danger, and yet is often done, is because:
It is easy until the next time: until Higher Education expects some independent ability to study and to use abstract thought. Preparation for HE then has not done its job. |
Plus:
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Part of unlearning is to realise that there are few simple answers to intellectual problems.
The impression was once given that there were set answers, but the student needs to know that from now on there are not. Education moves from the predominantly concrete (with a little learning from) to the predominantly abstract:
Access to HE ought to make a student aware of the future of study, and to be confident about handling both knowledge and ambiguity. |
In the course of day to day learning, teaching methods can employ practical steps to help students cope:
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It is possible to identify when students are developing more advanced blocks to learning. They show |
Defence mechanisms |
Defence mechanisms show outward signs as students employ their blocks to learning. These involve:
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It is important to try to teach from the beginning in a way that that tackles blocks to learning:
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In finding appropriate teaching methods, it is useful to consider three zones of activity: that of the teacher, the subject and the student, and how these interact:
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Important throughout is seeing that students have adequate literacy and study skills to carry a subject. If they do not, these need delivering first or alongside the learning. |
In assisting study skills the teacher should become something of a mentor. A mentor says: |
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Each student joins a tradition of intellectual thought or methodology. The mentor should, in the context of that tradition:
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To mentor is to focus on the human relationships, on the display of commitment, and on resourcing the learning through study skills and literacy. |
The Mentor offers:
How is this done? By using the semi-structured interview format not just for assessment but for a wide ranging enquiry and showing the basis of support. If these are realised, then the teacher-student relationship can develop. |
But eventually the teacher pulls back so that the student can develop necessary autonomy. |
I have experience delivering:
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Rogers, A. (1996), Teaching Adults, second edition, Buckingham: Open University Press, especially 204-219.