Learning to Become Good Mothers: Immigrant Mothers as Adult Learners

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-394
Author(s):  
Yidan Zhu

Immigrant mothers, who are socially constructed as an isolated group of people, are often excluded from the studies of adult learners. In adult education, few studies focus on immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, mothering, and knowing. Based on a critical ethnographical study, this article sheds lights on immigrant mothers’ learning in a foreign land. It unveils how immigrant mothers learn mothering skills and how their lifelong learning practice interacts with the ideology of mothering in contemporary neoliberal contexts. The data come from a 2-year critical ethnographic study that included 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrant mothers in a Vancouver-based immigration settlement organization in Canada. The following five types of immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practices are examined and analyzed: (a) learning parenting skills, (b) learning to find a job, (c) learning language, (d) learning to drive, and (e) learning to live a healthy lifestyle. This article argues that immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practice constitutes a mechanism, one in which the ideology of mothering and immigrant mothers’ everyday learning and mothering deeply interact to reproduce race, gender, and class relations. This article concludes that there is a need to study immigrant mothers, as adult learners, and to reexamine knowledge systems, ideologies, and people’s different ways of knowing and learning in adult education.

Author(s):  
Victor X. Wang ◽  
Valerie A. Storey

To serve a significant portion of the student population, adult learners, in the academy in the 21st century, this chapter argues that online education (e-learning) has the potential to open wider the door to greater access and advancement for learners across their life spans than the traditional four walled classroom. Some of the major issues revolving around online education and adult learners, such as policy, access, completion, and equity, are addressed in this chapter. The purpose of this chapter is to identify future technology trends, and then show how we can rely on practice and research to harness the great yet untapped potential of online education to promote online education programs, especially among adult learners. Policy, access, completion, and equity must be well addressed if online adult education is to be employed effectively and efficiently.


Author(s):  
Karim A. Remtulla

This chapter produces a socio-cultural critique of the ‘rational training’ workplace e-learning scenario. In this workplace e-learning scenario, workplace e-learning for workplace adult education training is used to justify the workforce through standards, categories, and measures. The alienating effects that arise out of this rush towards technocentric rationalization of the workforce through workplace e-learning are also discussed. These are the unintended and paradoxically opposite outcomes to the effects actually anticipated. An exploratory case study problematizes the unquestioned acceptance of the technological artefacts of workplace e-learning within organizations as credible sources to provide a rationale to justify workforces within workplaces. This approach critiques the presumption of infallibility of the technological artefacts of workplace e-learning; considers the short-comings of the conceiving of workplace e-learning as ‘finished’; and, reveals the ‘underdetermined’ nature of workplace e-learning technological artefacts. Socio-cultural insensitivity from workplace e-learning, in this scenario, comes from the basic, unquestioned assumption that workers are essentially socially flawed and culturally inferior; accountable for overcoming their sociocultural flaws and inferiorities; and, need to be justified by workplace e-learning, through standards, categories, and measures, to meet the expectations of the infallible and commodified workplace. A workplace e-learning that is deployed to justify the workforce, through standardization, categorization, and measurement, all result in a workforce being alienated from: (a) each other (worker-worker alienation); (b) their work (worker-work alienation); and, (c) their personal identities and sense of self (worker-identity alienation). Social rationalization is not the means to social justice in the workplace when it comes to workplace adult education and training, workplace e-learning, and the diverse and multicultural learning needs of a global cohort of adult learners.


2011 ◽  
pp. 83-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Díez

This chapter describes an experience in teacher training for e-learning in the field of adult education. It takes into account the models offered by flexible lifelong learning as the proper way to develop training for teachers in service, considering the advantages of blended learning for the target audience. The chapter discusses the balance between mere ICT skills and pedagogical competences. In this context the learning design should always allow that the teachers in training integrate in their work ICT solutions that fit to the didactic objectives, renew teaching and learning methodology, facilitate communication, give place to creativity, and allow pupils to learn at their own pace. By doing so, they will be closer to the profile of a tutor online, as a practitioner who successfully takes advantages of the virtual environments for collaborative work and learning communication.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 032-042
Author(s):  
Jamal Barhone ◽  
Omar Erradi ◽  
Maha Khaldi ◽  
Mohamed Erradi ◽  
Mohamed Khaldi

Much educational research has raised the effectiveness of situational teaching or training aroaches, especially for adult learners in work situations, due to their social and professional nature. The situational aroach (SAP) or situated learning (SL) to refer to the learner, stipulates that learning cannot be isolated from the context of its alications, and that knowledge is insertable from action. In this context, the situation becomes central in the acquisition of knowledge and the development of capacities and skills, which are now the aims. We therefore deduce that any design, development and implementation of e-learning training for adults is imperatively based on the modelling of the said learning situation. The objective of this article is to analyze certain models of situations and to propose a model-process more relevant with e-learning training for adults. For the sake of modelling visibility, we use a modified model of the Vee diagram from Gowing’s model.


Author(s):  
Victor X. Wang

To serve a significant portion of the student population, adult learners, in the academy in the 21st century, this chapter argues that online education (e.g., e-learning) has the potential to open wider the door to greater access and advancement for learners across their life spans than the traditional, four walled classroom teaching. Some of the major issues revolving around online education and adult learners such as policy, access, completion, and equity have been addressed in this chapter. The purpose of this chapter is to show it’s possible to rely on practice and research to harness the great, yet untapped potential of online education to market and promote online education programs, especially among adult learners. Marketing and promoting online education programs are equally as important as helping adult learners learn.


Author(s):  
Victor X. Wang

To serve a significant portion of the student population, adult learners, in the academy in the 21st century, this chapter argues that online education (e.g., e-learning) has the potential to open wider the door to greater access and advancement for learners across their life spans than the traditional four walled classroom. Some of the major issues revolving around online education and adult learners such as policy, access, completion and equity have been addressed in this chapter. The purpose of this chapter is to show how we can rely on practice and research to harness the great yet untapped potential of online education to promote online education programs especially among adult learners. Policy, access, completion and equity must be well addressed if online adult education is to be employed effectively and efficiently.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147797142091860
Author(s):  
Victor Wang ◽  
Geraldine Torrisi-Steele ◽  
Elizabeth Reinsfield

Adult learners can have well-established ‘ways of knowing’, so a process of transformation represents learning that challenges them to discover new ways of thinking. Transformative learning is thus a frame for the practice of adult educators. The affordances of technologies can be exploited to facilitate transformative learning in adult learning contexts. However, this response is not consistently applied. In the present article, the authors highlight that technology is a tool within teaching strategy, and that it can be used to facilitate transformative learning albeit in a slightly different manner depending upon the epistemological stance of the educator. Adult and vocational teaching practice is positioned within four epistemological stances: post-positivist, constructivist, advocacy/participatory and pragmatism. Discussion focuses on the opportunities for transformative learning, made possible by digital technologies, within each of these epistemological stances.


Author(s):  
Karim A. Remtulla

This chapter looks at the socio-cultural implications of universalized education for workers. A universalized education for workers by workplace e-learning happens through hypermedia-centric, constructivist-based workplace e-learning that configures technologies, constructivism, and instructors, for a knowledge-based workplace. Workplace e-learning for workplace adult education and training has changed over the past decade with respect to the changes and complexities of the learning process. This is especially true given the growing prevalence of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Distance education in the tertiary sector is looked at to see what is revealed from workplace adult education and training encounters with workplace e-learning. This raises questions about workplace e-learning for a global workforce. Workplace e-learning epitomizes a constructivist practice in the workplace; heavily based on European and Western industrialized values; and, remains unconcerned with the culturally specialized adult learning needs and goals of a diverse, global, and multi-facetted, cohort of adult learners. Looking primarily at the constructivist turn in distance education, perspectives of epistemology, ontology, and pedagogy, are referenced that support this trend. The universalizing ramifications of this hypermedia- centred, constructivist trend in workplace e-learning for workplace adult education and training are concerning for a global and diverse cohort of adult learners, who will come to represent the workforce in the future. Technique is increasingly used as the omnibus answer for all learners’ needs and goals. ‘Technology’ increasingly replaces epistemology and ontology as the singular perspective for authentic learning. Some of the unseen, conformist, and persuasive effects of technology, constructivism, and instructors, are now problematized for a global workforce.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Pavlis Korres

The General Secretariat for Lifelong Learning and Youth (GSLLLY), the strategic national entity for Adult Education in Greece, has designed and implemented various e-learning courses offering flexibility beyond time and space restrictions. The courses run in two consecutive periods, the first one from 2008 to 2011 and the second one from 2014 to 2016. This paper is focusing on key design and implementation features of the courses in both periods and is analyzing the ways and the level by which the evaluation of the courses of the first period affected positively the design of the courses in the second period by enhancing the strengths and rectifying the weaknesses. Further on the evaluation results of the second period courses clearly showed that the majority of the first period problems have been solved and provided useful material for further improvement.


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