Learning at the Center

OurU: A University Offering in the Community

OurU is a free, non-credit university-level course offered in partnership between a university and community-based adult learning center in a major urban center of Canada. Since 2008, OurU has been offered as a 9-week course in the fall and winter semesters. The weekly, 2-hr classes are intended for adults who have a passion for learning but whose ever-shrinking options to participate in formal education opportunities are compounded by challenges of mental illness, addiction, illiteracy, poverty, and homelessness. Thus, the course was publicized in community service and public learning spaces such as centers for adult learning and public libraries. It has been offered at a community learning center closely located to other services the learners may access and near campus. In an effort to be equitable and accessible, OurU seeks to reduce barriers to participating in class by providing all materials and supplies as well as bus tickets and light, nutritious snacks. OurU provides opportunities for marginalized individuals to foster critical thinking, unlearn negative myths about themselves as learners, and engage a wide variety of new ideas and perspectives in a format accessible to all (Brookfield, 2005; Butin, 2007; Mulcahy, 2009, Spencer, 2006).

The following observations are made about OurU during fall 2012 and winter 2013 semesters. A great many guest speakers, volunteers, and others critical to making these semesters a success were simply too busy to become involved in this writing project. Thus, these observations are limited to our experiences as co-learners. As instructional team members in the 2012-2013 academic year, we each held different external roles: One was the OurU Leader responsible for managing the course (e.g., developing syllabus, liaising with learners, and recruiting volunteers) and hired to do so by the university as a part-time staff member; two were graduate students and one a postdoctoral fellow volunteering in the class.

OurU’s content changed each term, drawing primarily from themes in the social sciences or humanities, and with the notion of supporting participants’ self-efficacy and critical thinking and development (Giroux, 2008; McLaren, 2009). A variety of philosophical perspectives were always present in OurU planning, preparation and delivery, but these were brought together into a seamless community member experience. Although it changed depending on participants, the ratio of volunteers to community members was often low, usually with one volunteer to four or five community members.

A standard class began with greetings, announcements, and an opportunity for learners to answer each other’s questions about the previous class. The person responsible for leading the class on that particular day would then use the next 30 to 40 min to present information from varying perspectives about the topic and in the context of each semester’s theme. Approximately halfway through the class, there was a lifestyle break, and participants snacked, smoked, and visited with one another for 15 min. The class continued with a discussion-based activity, facilitated by the instructor, and intended to reinforce or re-emphasize the discussion topic. The class ended with a small group activity providing learners the opportunity to contribute to a class project featured in an open house style celebration. The conclusion of this course was celebrated as a shared-meal emphasizing the achievement of course completion. Each participant who successfully completed the program according to requirements set out at the beginning would receive a certificate from the university. This certificate was a prized and important validation among graduating community members; however, participants most cherished the highly personalized letter from the OurU manager, enumerating their contributions and growth during the term.

In addition to tackling economic barriers to higher education, OurU attempts to create a safe space where individuals are supported enough to break through barriers to learning such as low self-esteem, negative educational experiences as learners, and fear of failure. As one community member learner wrote about the class in the fall of 2012,

It has helped me on many occasions learn new and wonderful things I would have never known before. It also helped me on days where I may have been dealing with some type of issue and whenever I would go to the class I would leave feeling much better than when I started—so it has also been therapeutic for me as well. (Member 2, personal communication, October 18, 2012)

This course was also a forum in which participants often entrusted individual struggles to others through self-disclosure. As an instructional team member stated, “This is what it feels like to be trusted” (Member 3, personal communication, October 29, 2012). Importantly, within this therapeutic course context, there was also a hazard in being naïve about street and community life, and this class did not try to provide or replace existing social services.

Supporting Literature

OurU’s approach to learning is not the product of dominant paradigms that confine education’s purpose to employability (Becker, 2006). It is worth noting an increasingly employment-orientated approach to education is often broadly assumed, and may well have been an unmet expectation for community members. Instead, we viewed education as “a social activity, [that] takes place within specific social, political and economic relations” (Spencer, 2006, p. 4). For us, this understanding of education means the instructor is a facilitator, fostering “critical capacities, modes of literacies, knowledge, and skills that enable [learners] both to read the world critically and to participate in shaping and governing it” (Giroux, 2008, p. 116). Subsequently, our aim is to design learning experiences that draw on an individual’s unique experience, as we understand learning as a social process “whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb & Kolb, 2005, p. 194). While these are only a few selected ideas from the supporting literature, they are central to understanding the aspirations and positive regard instructional team members held for learners.

OurU’s learning environment is also framed by the specialized teaching-learning challenge posed by the learner’s mature identity (Magro, 2001). Where receptiveness to learning exists in the mature identity, the learner is challenged with bringing new knowledge into a previously existing knowledge set and being psychologically open to new knowledge. The term psychological is important because the adult learner is not simply re-organizing new information to make room for a few more widgets in the cognitive closet. Adult learners also assess the threat new knowledge represents to existing knowledge and ways of thinking, including self-knowledge and self-understanding or identity. Thus, OurU’s small group work, writing activities, and group discussions offer learners opportunities to reflect, share observations, and experiment with new words and ideas (Brookfield, 2005; Kolb & Kolb, 2005). Ultimately, we sought to foster self-direction and autonomy in the learner, and the degree to which community members were able to shape their learning context through an evaluation process became an important question (Whelan, 1988). For example, was OurU’s content relevant in the participants’ worldview?

Often in adult learning contexts, course evaluation is pre-determined by the interests, priorities, and perspectives of those conducting the evaluation. Following Fenwick (2000), we asked how learners are able to be self-directed and autonomous if they do not have a meaningful role in the evaluation process. Conventional process often stipulates evaluation objectives and outcomes measurement before learners have process input. In other words, the goal of fostering learners’ ability to understand their learning process and progress—and to define or shape it for themselves—is forgotten or lost. Recognizing the learner’s absence in OurU’s evaluation process has been a basic—but particularly important—step in developing this article. Certain community members have already been the subject of social research but, arguably, often without access to the necessary knowledge to make sense of the results and conclusion. In addition, there have been multiple occasions where learners have shared their discontent with involvement in previous research experiences, which as they perceived and expressed, have often dismissed their interests in the conduct of differing research agendas. In some cases, this has led to general feelings of antipathy toward social science research. In some circumstances, knowledge gleaned from their role as research subjects has been inaccessible to the research subjects themselves, as findings are published in expensive academic journals, difficult to access without university or institutional library membership.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has tried to address some of these issues by working to democratize research processes. Specifically, CBPR is democratic in that it is collaborative and grounded in the equitable participation of those involved (Greenwood & Levin, 1998). The aim is to co-produce knowledge that can lead to social change on the community’s own terms (Flicker, Travers, Guta, McDonald, & Meagher, 2007; Kajner, Fletcher, & Makokis, 2012; Lavallée, 2009). Drawing on CBPR perspectives, the conventional evaluation process in OurU risked hard-won trust between community members and the instructional team. Thus, we maintain, if OurU is about fostering opportunities for learning as a social and transformational process, it must place learners and learner autonomy at the center of course evaluation.

To this end, Fenwick (2000) proposed dynamic assessment, which “strives to be holistic, learner-driven, context-sensitive, and intended to extend long past the conclusion of an instructional program” (p. 77). In dynamic assessment, learning cannot be understood through a series of fragmented moments chosen by an evaluator. Learning in Fenwick’s model of assessment is also understood not as something that happens in the individual known as the learner. Rather, in dynamic assessment, learning is understood as a process that unravels through a series of collaborative and collective systems in which people participate. For Fenwick, learning is not linear: “The focus of dynamic assessment is not simply what the learner knows or can do, but also how the learner is developing knowledge and skill, and how the learner and the evaluator are understanding the process” (p. 79). Dynamic assessment “seeks to ‘capture what unfolds’ in social environments where meanings and perceptions are complex” (p. 79), and it is committed to fostering collaborative and reflective inquiry about learning and the purposes of learning.

Evaluating OurU

In our first and more conventional attempts to evaluate OurU, we used an informal and reflexive tool called 1-minute evaluations. Learners were asked (a) “What is something you learned today?” and (b) “What is something you would like to learn?” In between classes, we discussed the written responses with an emphasis on how we could integrate them into upcoming classes and planning for future OurU offerings. This was not a particularly systematic process, although a deliberate effort was made to use learners’ ideas and suggestions for future class topics. We also recognized the 1-minute evaluation process fell short of dynamic assessment’s potential contribution. Despite our intention to enable the co-construction of knowledge in a democratic learning space, learner interests and priorities drifted toward the periphery of the evaluation process.

The impetus for this proposal to renew the evaluation process was a shared wish to avoid reinforcing conventions that position managers and instructors as the sole arbiters of what is relevant and important. It was also easy to see the ability and knowledge of these learners in class, and believe they could be powerful actors in shaping their own learning. In addition to the myriad challenges (i.e., budget and resource limitations) that routinely filter out good ideas and activities in community-based research and learning, there is a systemic paucity of resources and difficulty in documenting the successes that have occurred in a rich historical legacy of adult learning in Canada (Quigley, 2006; Selman & Dampier, 1991; Stabler, 1987). Last, given OurU’s growing symbiosis and momentum, there was a confidence and trust in the group that supported pedagogical experimentation. In the next section, we introduce our ideas for evaluation renewal and discuss the benefits, limitations, and problems that may accompany implementation.

Concluding Thoughts

The aim of this proposal is to enhance adult learners’ ability to evaluate their learning experiences, with the goal of adopting more learner-directed content into the OurU curriculum. This course holds a uniquely collaborative and inclusive course design space between a university and a community-based adult learning center, and we propose a cautious extension of that bridge. In an optimistic moment, our aspiration for this kind of collaboration is “knowledge production that is intrinsically capable of producing public goods through concrete and practical problem-solving” (Greenwood & Levin, 1998, p. 16). Here, we see possible learning benefits to a collaborative approach extending beyond the bounds of community education into research and practice circles. We offer no easy answer to the long-standing problems of knowledge silos and hierarchies characterizing the contemporary university, nor the stark challenges and budgetary constraints found within community-based learning and research. Our idea is that if a university education is to be a public good, it need be integrated with civil society and community beyond a basic knowledge-for-economy or data–pool relationship. By working to center community learners’ needs, we extend OurU into a realm of community–university mutuality. We invite you to continue this conversation about evaluative practice, enhancing evaluation capability, and exploring possibilities for bridging between Canadian universities and the communities they serve.