I’ve been pretty tied up with my two Masters subjects this semester and on reflection one would have been more than enough! However, the end is in sight and I’ve learned a greaat deal along the way - mostly about myself (as seems to be the case) as well as having lots of support in many forms, online and physically speaking.

One such help has been access to Google Books. What a fabulous service! I’ve always dipped into Google Books on occassions and then have used either my institute’s library or online databases to grab the actual book or journal article if available. However, as I’ve been studying my Masters by distance (supplemented with online resources and interactions), I’ve had less than ideal access to key texts in many cases. Google books has come to my rescue! I have built up a library of books I’ve been reading over the last few months and have added labels/tags for quick searching when I’ve needed to return to a book or theme, such as ‘critical pedagogy’. The extension tools also look worthwhile; adding your booklist or library to your blog or sharing via an RSS feed, or even posting a review if you feel the urge.

In addition to Google Books, I’ve also been keeping a collection of sites, videos and articles via my delicious account. Here’s an example for my subject, Education for Social Change. Both services have been invaluable not only in collecting information, but in organising and collating information in meaningful ways, through tagging, adding notes (often I include an abstract from the site or article) and combining tags to drill down into the information I’ve collected over time. I use keyword tags together with time/date type of tags to help narrow down information (very helpful as I’ve managed to stretch my Masters out over 3 years!).

My next and final essay is for the subject, Education for Social Change. I’d like to explore the idea that the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and other sites has inadvertantly served to further embed us as ‘automaton conformists’ (Erich Fromm). I could look at Chomsky and the role of mass media, as sites like these are often owned by large corporations in many cases, but I’m more curious to explore Fromm’s notion of ‘fear of freedom’ and a phrase my lecturer, Rick, mentioned on a recent discussion thread, that is, ‘group think’. It also calls for a rethink in education about digital literacy and developing the digital citizen for a connected future.

This is close to my heart, with regards to my work, where we often promote social networking tools like blogs and wikis to ‘open up’ a teacher’s approach to teaching, but often we see there is limited uptake, especially by students, and various colleagues around the country seem to be seeing similar results - there are not many exceptions to the rule, highlighting the challenges in seeing Web2.0 as a ‘freeing’ view of the Web, for the people and by the people, and as a legitimate learning medium.

More soon…

The Museum of Australian Democracy has just opened in Old Parliament House in Canberra. It

showcases key historical figures, events and decisions that have influenced the democracy we live in (Parkes, ‘Panorama,’ The Canberra Times, May 9).

There’s more than just Australia’s democratic history on display, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington feature amongst others.

[image: RiotACT]

Curator, Johanna Parker, reckons we’ll be challenged by what the museum exhibits and the various points of view shown. It’s also described as a “museum of ideas not of objects” and we’re asked to consider what we think about events and people in our history. I’ll be visiting soon and I’m especially interested in the balance between little ‘d’ democracy and bit ‘D’ Democracy. Parker assures us that there’s a fair share of both:

“There is something about democracy, social reform, liberty and fighting for the voice of people that just inspired ordinary people to do such incredible things” (ibid).

There are other Museums of Democracy, most noticeably the US Museum of Democracy. Then there’s the Cyberhall of Democracy and Human Rights, and I’m sure plenty of projects about democracy (particularly, I’d imagine, across the US), its expression, history and activities.

And a final word from Senator John Faulkner on the Museum’s opening:

“democracy isn’t words on a page, or numbers on a ballot paper, but a day-to-day lived experience.”

The Museum officially opened yesterday.

It is an educational practitioner’s role (I argue) to engage with social media, to look beyond the surface layers of services like Youtube and get beneath it, to create accounts and subscribe to new content feeds, to favorite and comment and connect, and to realise the deeper layers of what is available in social media collections, and to help identify quality information and resources and help it to emerge and rise above other content. Further, if by chance that teacher notices something missing, or something in need of correction, to see that need as an opportunity for them to create the additional or corrective media and add it back into the social media so that it can play its role in that wider collective context. Its “teachable moment”.

The Educational Point of View « Learn Online

I reckon Leigh’s hit the nail on the head here. And the contested role of the teacher as facilitator is all the more apparent. If I look to bell hooks’s work with popular culture artifacts, this is another demonstration of using social media to generate ‘teachable moments’. Mitra’s work is also a good example - a social experiment contesting the role/need of the classroom as a ‘prerequisite’ for learning.

Our learning, as with our teaching is iterative, messy, frustrating, serendipitous and we often fight to control it so as to make it neat and tidy (as we’ve been expected to do), especially in conventional educational contexts. This is why I like the notion of ‘hot action’ that David Beckett (1995, 2001) writes about - it acknowledges the work done ‘on the fly’ with a confidence and a grasp of knowledge that enables someone to push forward to pick up a new skill, strategy or process, whatever it might be. It validates what people develop, understand and learn ‘in action’, whilst working, living, playing - whatever it is that makes up our day (although Beckett talks about the workplace as the context for ‘hot action’).

There’s also the acknowledgment of the body and bodily understanding in Beckett’s notion (not a new thing if you look at work by Merleau-Ponty for example). This isn’t about ‘muscle memory’, repetitive actions refining practical skills, it is more about how our bodies carry and dispense social cues and facets of power (see Foucault’s Power/Knowledge and work by McLaren (1986) and Turner (1982) on the body and ritual for example). This is how we BE, our Self within a social context loaded with power, social politics - the body politic, ‘regimes of truth’ (again, see Foucault). We don’t just teach, we are the embodiment of teaching, likewise a student, a mother, a singer, a carpenter. We don’t simply take on the role - we BE, through our veins, our eyes, our voice, our skeleton.

And so to Leigh’s final paragraph:

I don’t for a second believe that “the education sector” should be waiting until the “greater society” shows prevalent change - we ARE the greater society aren’t we? How can we dissect society in this way? Is change about taking turns? What makes education sit outside the greater society? Since when do we need some sort of permission to “respond when those changes are prevalent”? Who will tell us when that happens?

Stick to your guns Leigh - the proof is in the practice. Surely a critical mass of ‘teachable moments’ must at some point amount to a revolution?

Refs:
Beckett, D. (2001) ‘Hot Action’ At Work: Understanding ‘Understanding’ Differently, in T. Fenwick (ed.) Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Learning Through Work. New Directions for Adult and Community Education Series. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Beckett, D. (1995) Adult Education as Professional Practice. PhD thesis. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/handle/2100/337

McLaren, P. (1986) Schooling as a Ritual Performance. Taylor & Francis.
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=mYcOAAAAQAAJ

Turner, V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. PAJ Publications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Turner

bells hooks: cultural criticism and transformation

6-minute talk by hooks on the accessibility of popular culture items such as films, to engage people in critical thinking about society and difference.

I’ve been reading a bit of hooks’s work, particularly ‘Teaching to Transgress‘ (1994), as part of my MEd studies this semester, as we undertake an exercise in defining, describing, critiquing and writing about our own educational philosophical stance.

hooks didn’t see herself as a teacher, more a writer - but ended up a teacher writing about her teaching experiences and the (dis)engagement with learning along the way. She refers to Freire as an influence as well as feminist theorists, as well as her own learning experiences, as driving the development of her educational philosophy.

Image: Freire on Infed

She writes so that her thoughts are accessible to a continuum of readers or audiences. And, she sees learning as an expression of excitement and engagement for its sheer pleasure! A refreshing view these days. It draws suspicion when one shows an eagerness to learn - I’d add that it also exposes the teacher/facilitator to also rise to the challenge in (enthusiastically) supporting that eager learning (–you expect me to develop curricula on a shrinking resource base and low salary AND you want me to enjoy it too?)! “To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress” (hooks 1994: 7, my emphasis).

hooks also notes the learning ’struggle’ as a real and necessary part of learning, yet in the context of minority groups, means a highly stressful learning setting - and yet can still be exciting, if the will to learn is strong. As with Freire, hooks sees education as the practice of freedom.

To ask the ‘why’ questions can be confronting and at times show-stopping. How do you encourage your students to ask why?

I had a fabulous weekend in Bowral back in the last weekend of May, attending a Calmbirth workshop with my husband. Consequently, our first bub is now due in a couple of - ahem - days!

This is one reason I haven’t posted in a long while - too much going on and my brain has become more cottony than I had first anticipated!

Anyway, I’m moved to write following this amazing weekend experience as I see some links to lifelong learning, a phrase that seems to have dropped out of circulation of late (for whatever reason). Let’s first revisit the phrase and then I’ll draw some connections from the Calmbirth workshop itself. In essence, this is an ‘appreciative exploration’ of some thoughts really!

Lifelong learning, particularly as espoused by the OECD, champions the idea of learning for holistic personal, professional and workforce development, which occurs in various learning settings, informal and formal. Closer to home, DEST (now DEEWR) exercises a policy they claim is based on the OECD assumptions:

The lifelong learning policy agenda is built on assumptions about the importance of skills in the new economy. Almost all industrial sectors are increasingly ‘knowledge-based’ and economic returns are obtained from a range of ‘intangible’ inputs, one of which is workers’ skills. Participation in education and training is increasing and economic rewards are flowing to people with high skills…

…which in fact draws a parallel between productivity and further education, and extends further to lifelong learning and the ‘whole person’, especially where the VET sector is concerned. However, in today’s economic rationalist world we are not seeing this in its entirety. We are contending with the worker-learner and have yet to move to the whole person, in reality.

So how does this thinking link to what I experienced as ‘calm birth’ then? Well, from my view it means starting with the person, rather than the system in which the person likely operates. in essence it’s redefining what we have assumed to be learner centred approaches to teaching and learning. Still, we seem to take this as meaning providing options TO the learner to support and enhance their learning; rather, we should take the learner-at-the-centre approach and start there with their networks, their predispositions, their experiences, and so on. We require more discussion around the apparent preoccupation on separating ‘the system’ from the users/producers/agents (see for example, Mejias 2005).

Thus, the science behind Calmbirth (as laid out in the workshop booklet and the various parents’ stories, where mums especially are co-teachers), contends with the human design, participatory methods, holistic therapies and healing work, beliefs and attitudes (e.g. Errington, 2004), cultural values and awareness, as well as the health sciences of midwifery and obstetrics.

So what is out there in terms of calm learning practices? How can we progress this to lifelong learning status? For example, Calm Kids, Smart Kids uses

…a mixture of:

• Physical exercises proven to reduce hyperactivity & increase brain functioning and integration
• Emotional stress release to help reduce anger and frustration, improve communication and increase self esteem
• Unique Nutrition Plan identifies allergies and deficiencies specifically for your child.

What is of some interest here is the links made to factors that influence children’s ability to learning and grow, as discussed also in the Calmbirth workshop and booklet, particularly a stressful pregnancy, a traumatic birth, and medications and operations, as well as accidents, family trauma, and allergic reactions. As Peter Jackson stated in the Calmbirth workshop, ‘it all begins in the womb’. Check out Lyn Schaverien’s work on developmental learning (biological aspects of learning) too.

We may also draw links to appreciative inquiry (see also Cooperrider, et al, 2008) and inquiry-based learning which champions the inherent (and essentially positive) motivations of the learner from within. For me this also conjures links with schooling approaches such as the Montessori movement. We could effectively read open learning into this too. These approaches tend to focus on the learner’s self-guided interests, reminding me of a quote by Freire that champions the learner as teacher (as ‘learning by teaching’):

The teacher… is taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught, also teach.

I understand that I’m touching on a lot of potentially disparate areas of education here, but I think it’s worth noting that whilst we delve into supposedly ‘new’ thinking around learning and teaching, much has been developed in earlier times that remain credible and applicable today - in fact, possibly more so than they did in the past. The time for elements of schooling and education is ripe for change but not always to new and original ideas, but back to ideas that are now seen as befitting our current contexts.

Where can learning go from here? How do we continue to facilitate learning in ways that are relevant to our times? These are some loose connections which I hope to think more deeply about in coming months. I also see connections to networked learning here too, a draft essay of which I will post shortly (this essay picks up on action learning, ‘hot action’, and other action research frameworks that I’ve related to an investigation into VET pedagogy and practice).

References

Errington, E. (2004) The impact of teacher beliefs on flexible learning innovation: some practices and possibilities for academic developers, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 41(1), 39-47.

Cooperrider, D, Whitney, D & Stavros, J (2008), Apreciative Inquiry Handbook: For Leaders of Change (2nd Ed), Crown Custom Publishing Inc: Brunswick OH.

I have a presentation lined up next week and have been reviewing my thinking on flexible learning and learning futures generally.

So far, I’ve returned to two slideshows I loaded to Flickr some time earlier this year and will likely focus my thinking on ideas from these for my presentation.

1. Quality through personalised learning

2. The business of learning (or, 21st century learning)

I think I’ll focus on learning futures and how flexible learning is defined and can be promoted through this thinking. Some of the key themes I’d like to draw out include:

• learner as teacher
• business IS learning
• the learning design process is a collaborative one with the learner

I’ll start with that and see where I head - shall post an update soon! What do you reckon?

I have been stewing over e-portfolios and PLEs lately, particularly as we head into the new year and avenues by which to further traverse the (e)learning meta-scape!

I came across this recently:

A PLE is composed of a set of customized applications on the client side. Some of them will operate in a standalone way, while others will exchange information with server side applications. Thus, if a PLE becomes essential for the daily work of a user, the data flow between client and server side applications will allow the automatic feed of the social networks to which the users belongs to.

PLE bricks for social network construction « Personal Learning Environments

This short post on the PLE blog got me thinking about Donald Norman’s book Emotional Design (2004), particularly his closing remarks about design. It’s a dilemma many designers - educational, architectural, mechanical, etc contend with - that is, if we design it will they come? The quote above from the post doesn’t say ‘PLE’ to me, more it says ‘here are tools to generate your PLE’. Same goes for discussions around ‘e’portfolios - portfolios are methods, processes, learning approaches, outcomes, etc - adding an ‘e’ only says this is a electronically supported portfolio, another tool or space for me to generate some learning/living/reflection - or whatever frames the portfolio approach in a pedagogical sense (meaning that we are all pedagogues).

Donald Norman (2004),

We are all designers. We manipulate the environment, the better to serve our needs. We select what items to own, which to have around us. We build, buy, arrange, and restructure: all this is a form of design (p.224, my emphasis).

And further on,

We are all designers - and have to be. Professional designers can make things that are attractive and that work well. They can create beautiful products that we fall in love with at first sight. They can create products that fulfill our needs, that are easy to understand, easy to use, and that work just the way we want them to. …. But they cannot make something personal, make something we bond to. Nobody can do that for us: we must do it for ourselves (p.225, my emphasis).

And finally, this,

We are all designers - because we must be. We live our lives, encounter success and failure, joy and sadness. We structure our own worlds to support ourselves throughout life. Some occasions, people, places, and things come to have special meanings, special emotional feelings. These are our bonds, to ourselves, to our past, and to the future. When something gives pleasure, when it becomes a part of our lives, and when the way we interact with it helps define our place in society and in the world, then we have love. Design is part of this equation, but personal interaction is the key (p.227, my emphasis).

It’s not that we should give up and throw away design, or PLEs, or (e)portfolios; more that we can pass on the design decisions to others - which to me is what educational design should be about - learning the ropes, grappling with the concept, checking the landscape, reviewing and entering into the commentary, adding to the ‘research’, sharing the learning, and, ultimately, our lives.

PLEs are just this - US. We learn. We test that learning. We refine. We share with others. They share back, and with more others… it’s not the application, or the content, or the method even - it’s the interactions and the relationships that form and uniform as we learn, unlearn and relearn. Much like life really!

technorati tags:design, emotional_design, Donald_Norman, educational_design, PLE, e-portfolio, pedagogy

Blogged with Flock

Catching up on my feeds and landed on Dave Pollard’s blog once again - if there’s anything I read up close it’s Dave’s blog.

# THE FIRST KEY TO CHANGE: Relate: You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope. If you face a situation that a reasonable person would consider “hopeless,” you need the influence of seemingly “unreasonable” people to restore your hope–to make you believe that you can change and expect that you will change. This is an act of persuasion–really, it’s “selling.” The leader or community has to sell you on yourself and make you believe you have the ability to change. They have to sell you on themselves as your partners, mentors, role models, or sources of newknowledge. And they have to sell you on the specific methods or strategies that they employ.
# THE SECOND KEY TO CHANGE: Repeat: The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you’ll need. It takes a lot of repetition over time before new patterns of behavior become automatic and seem natural–until you act the new way without even thinking about it. It helps tremendously to have a good teacher, coach, or mentor to give you guidance, encouragement, and direction along the way. Change doesn’t involve just “selling”; it requires “training.”
# THE THIRD KEY TO CHANGE: Reframe: The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in a way that would have been so foreign to you that it wouldn’t have made any sense before you changed.

How to Save the World

I’m not sure where I’d be (in my head, that is) if Dave wasn’t around to offer some points of focus!

Change is imminent in my workplace - the path is now set, and the time for transition is upon us. Dave has proffered these timely points regarding change management, which I’m blogging here as a reminder for myself, should I feel lost along the way! These points above remind me again of the notion of emergence, or emergent design. Following this, Dave posted a conversation he had with Rob Paterson about the future of education, which I’m now going off to listen to.

I’ll post more in response to this shortly :o)

technorati tags:change, change_management, Dave_Pollard, emergent_design, future, organisational_change

Blogged with Flock

Just listened to the Leaders debate. Rudd v Howard. Whilst both were conservative, I’d have to agree that Rudd carried more energy about him than Howard, as these comments show. Nice one too by the ABC to stream the debate live over the Web.

[Image: ABC TV]

So, all in all, nothing really new if you’ve been following the campaign before it become The Campaign!

To me, Rudd won with his education policy, or ‘revolution’. The only tete-a-tete was a short joust over education midway through [see short clip here]. Then, with Howard’s big chance to make an impact in his final 2 minutes, all he could do was respond weakly to Rudd’s education revolution, by stating that we needed to go back to basics with education. His initial statement was to say how strong the economy is, and that a strong economy is the most important way to carry Australia forward. That’s as big as saying tax cuts - boring BORING! He had no passion about him regarding anything, policy or otherwise.

I wonder if Rudd will get his wish for two more debates? After tonight’s effort, what do ya reckon? ;o)

What does language have to do with learning and change in adult and work based learning contexts?

This short essay covers some thoughts about the use of language in relation to ‘learning and change’ (also the title of my Masters subject).

Introduction
Language plays a central role in learning as both seek to develop understanding and make sense of the world. Language enables us to interact with others in a shared process of making meaning. We use language to describe our reality and to communicate our sense of the world to, and with, others. In this same process, we also communicate who we are; that is, we construct not only our reality but also our ‘self’. When we learn we are engaged in a process of developing our understanding, attempting to make sense of something new or unknown to us. As described in the subject learning guide, ‘learning means getting access to new ways to mean’, so we not only learn new things but refine our learning process at the same time, or ‘learn how to learn’. Change then, is impacted by our efforts in learning new ways to mean; that is, to step from the known to the unknown (learning) and then to mark the transformation (change) from something unknown to known.

In an adult or work based learning context, language plays a significant role in one’s learning, as much as it does in early childhood development and learning. A workplace contains a specific profession (such as auto-mechanics), which involves language and discourse highly characteristic of that profession. The role of apprenticeship (a key component in the training and development in para-professions and trades) is in effect an initiation into the culture, context and discourse of a para-profession or trade. An apprentice, or ‘initiate,’ learns far more than the skills spelt out in a training package or work placement; I am certain that if one was to compare the language and demeanour of a third-year apprentice to a first-year, one would note significant difference. A third-year would use language and terminology with more authority and confidence and perhaps even embellish this with a greater experience than what you’d expect from a first-year, who would use the language more tentatively (and perhaps at times inappropriately).

It is important to also mention that teachers in the adult learning field are also challenged by language and discourse. Often a teacher in auto-mechanics is firstly an auto-mechanic prior to becoming a teacher. In fact, ‘becoming a teacher’ is as much an initiation for them as becoming an auto-mechanic is for their apprentices! It is this aspect of teaching in adult learning that is of most interest to me, being an educational designer and staff developer in a vocational education and training (VET) institute. In this short essay I wish to reflect on the VET teacher in relation to the overarching question:

What does language have to do with learning and change in adult and work based learning contexts?

Contributions from the research literature
I had not fully or explicitly considered the role of language in learning, prior to reading Painter (1989). Painter’s view of the role of language in learning is that we scaffold learning through the progression of our language development. While Painter refers to language development in children, this no doubt can be continually applied into adulthood. We can then add Halliday’s thinking about learning as a semiotic process, where he posits an approach to learning theory informed by language, where “theory would be based on natural data … in context, not in a vacuum; observed, not elicited” (1993, p.94), because “the process of language development is still a continuous learning process” (ibid, p.93). Again this highlights the inherent relationship between language and learning.

Just as Painter refers to scaffolding, Halliday uses the phrase ‘magic gateway’ (see p. 98) to discuss ways in which we might explicitly use language forms and interactions to develop strategies for learning. It is interesting that in adult learning approaches we engage in experiential learning approaches quite explicitly yet don’t seem to engage strategies informed by language. It is as if we assume adults have fully developed their language and it needs no further attention.

On reading Solomon (2003), this is not the case. Solomon discusses the role of portfolios in textually producing ourselves as worker-learners, as she outlines the use of portfolios in a higher education work based learning program. Solomon (2003, p.76) considers portfolio development as a pedagogical tool for learning in the program, and as a narrative text, and suggests that

portfolios can be understood as a site where learners reflexively create a life story of themselves by drawing on available social and cultural resources.

She then endeavours to answer a series of questions about how (and what) we can learn about the worker/learner, and indeed, importantly for me, when a learner or a worker becomes a ‘worker/learner’. The VET teacher is an ideal expose of the worker/learner, given they are in the unique position of being dual-professions as I call them. That is, VET teachers are firstly industry professions and secondly teaching professionals and need to constantly reconcile the two roles.

The scaffolding referred to by Painter (1989) is also evident in Solomon’s discussion around the work site as a site for learning; the academy explicitly frames the work site as a learning site, ‘reconstituting it as a learning experience’ (2003, p.79). This notion forces me to reconsider what we mean by informal learning (taken to mean learning that occurs in less formal settings, such as social and public settings, workplaces or otherwise), where we perhaps think too much about the physical setting and not enough about the frameworks that manifest or account for sites for learning. Reflection helps describe the learning encountered through the learner’s (work based) experience. Reflection is textually produced so thus involves written language. Solomon discussed the ways in which this reflective process is scaffolded (pp.79-83).

My reflections
Having worked through the literature in this module, I see some connection with aspects I would associate with in adult learning and work based learning contexts; namely reflection and the writing process involved in journaling, and in the development of portfolios. Reading the literature in this module has opened up some questions to me:

(1) Does a child’s internalisation of interactions (to produce models for speaking and writing, as described in Painter, 1989 and Halliday, 1993) pose a correlation to an adult’s learning in the process we call reflection?
(2) Does the textual production of oneself through the development of a portfolio adequately capture the discursive and dialogic processes adult learners engage in when they are learning in a workplace context (Solomon, 2003 and Kerka, 1996)?
(3) Is it possible to reconfigure adult learning spaces in ways similar to that proposed by Painter, to draw more deliberately on learners’ (and teachers’) interactions in talking and writing, especially in professional contexts (such as business administration, plumbing, hairdressing and other vocations)? Would this reconfiguration enhance what we have come to know as reflection, and also enhance the understandings about portfolio development for learning and assessment in adult learning settings?

Literacies (Macken-Horarik 1996) and contemporary learning settings which include information and communication technologies (ICTs) is a highly debated topic. The shift from commonsense to uncommonsense, or systematised, language (see Halliday 1993, pp.93-4) fits with this debate, given the rate of change in technology-enriched learning environments: portfolios are now e-portfolios, work based learning is often supplemented with online components, and one’s reflection can be recorded for ‘playback’ via online forums, emails, electronic documents, and audio and video clips. For example, I have found that new ICTs like blogs and wiki provide me with a greater space in which to write that potentially widens my audience (and thus my critics) to enable me to broaden and deepen my ideas as I ‘script’ them in the writing process. I have always kept a journal from a young age and now find that these web based tools complement my journaling in a positive way, extending my writing and discursive and dialogic processes at the same time. In addition, I have also found that I take copious amounts of notes knowing I can revisit (and thus re-use or re-organise) these (e.g. on a wiki) whenever and wherever I may be. Consequently, I feel as if my vocabulary, as well as my understanding of topics, is being enriched more deeply and more broadly than ever before. It seems that while we privilege experiential learning processes in adult learning settings we don’t necessary make the language development process as explicit.

Conclusion
What I’ve found incredibly interesting in this module is my journey of understanding as it has been reframed through a consideration of the role of language in learning. Speaking and writing in adult learning settings are manifested in textual practices such as portfolios, essay writing and structured discussion. I would contend that while language and learning share much, so too do text and identity in parallel, as posited by Solomon (2003, p.87) in her closing remarks:

Our focus here has been on the textual practices [used in a higher education Work-based Learning program], suggesting that these practices are an interesting pedagogical site to explore the way learners produce themselves as worker-learners.

Forming our identity is a key part of making meaning. Our ongoing development of language is also a key component to expressing our identity as well as new understandings and knowledges, and we can discuss our experiences and how we grow and change as a result.

References
Halliday, M.A.K. 1993. Towards a language based theory of learning. Linguistics and Education 5, 93-116.

Kerka, S. 1996. Journal writing and adult learning. ERIC Digest No.174. Retrieved 08/09/2007 from http://ericdigests.org/1997-2/journal.htm (ID: ED399413).

Macken-Horarik. M. 1996. Literacy and learning across the curriculum. In R. Hasan and G.Williams (Eds), Literacy in Society. London: Longman.

Painter, C. 1989. The role of interaction in learning to speak and learning to write. In J.R. Martin and C. Painter (Eds), Writing to mean: Teaching genres across the curriculum. Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, Occasional Papers 9. Sydney: University of Sydney, pp.62-97.

Solomon, N. 2003. Writing portfolios in work-based learning programs: Textually producing one-self. In C. Chappell, C. Rhodes, N. Solomon, M. Tennant and L. Yates (Eds), Reconstructing the Lifelong Learner: Pedagogy and Identity in Individual, Organisational and Social Change. London: Routledge.