It's a whole new ball game in adult education!

Sorting Out Nerves at the Starting Block

When I started the stint as a Teaching Fellow, I am considered a veteran teacher in the discipline of visual art and art education. But I am entering a whole new terrain altogether. I may have done a number of workshops and sharing for art teachers, but I recognized this would need a whole new GPS system to track the effectiveness of my work and even my own learning as I teach.

The prospective students - the target participants - are not secondary school teenagers but adults. The age range varies greatly, from the very young diploma students with the average age of 21 years to the in-service age range that can stretch to 50 years and more. I may be teaching the same core modules, but considering the sheer age range, it is a real challenge just to pitch the teaching. The participants' prior experience in education, intellectual and pedagogical dispositions and their affective readiness to plunge into a full-time course are all variables that will impact on the desired learning outcome.

Despite having a body of knowledge in curriculum and assessment in art, I am acutely aware that I will stumble along the way, and the best I could do is to aggressively activate my in-class observation as a trainer/lecturer to sift out real diagnostic data, that include articulated (verbal and/or written) and implied feedback from the participants. Did that make me a little anxious? It is a rhetorical question and the answer is a certain 'YES'!

I did ask myself if the saying 'people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care' would apply to adult learners. My cognitive stance would say 'NO', this notion need not apply to adults. After all, they are no longer teenagers and should have greater social, cognitive and emotional resilience. But my affective consciousness did not concur and I needed some frames of thinking to substantiate the nagging and nudging from my affective consciousness. Revisiting Myers-Briggs Personality Types and the now popular psychological theory of Growth (Incremental) and Fixed (Entity) mindset (Dweck et. al.) helped gave me some concrete points to ponder and deliberate. If we consider Mindset as a wide spectrum, then the real challenge comes when I consider the fact that each individual participant sits on a different point on the sliding scale of Growth VS Fixed orientation. It is daunting but at the same time, the challenge posed an immensely enticing opportunity!

It is a new ball game, no doubt. But I relish plunging into learning all over again!