Abstract
“When I let go of my misinformed preconceptions, the women and I were able to share a productive and enjoyable learning opportunity.”
I recently returned from fieldwork in West Africa where I collected data for my dissertation, a case study of one non-governmental organization’s (NGO) educational programs. While I was there, I also volunteered for the NGO by contributing to program planning and instructional design activities. In addition, because I have a mathematics background, I was asked to teach a short basic mathematics lesson for some women working in a particularly rural location. In this essay, I share what I learned about creating student-centered adult education programs with those who wish to teach adults internationally or in similar contexts.
Although I did not have research activities to conduct at the particular site, I visited the town as part of my effort to familiarize myself with all the NGO’s programs. Because I knew my schedule would be flexible while there, I agreed to teach the mathematics lesson during the visit. Prior to traveling, I repeatedly heard from other Westerners (NGO employees and volunteers) how little the women knew and how desperately they needed my expertise, thus implying a sense of helplessness. Based on perceptions of flawed local education systems, I was cautioned to expect docile students trained simply to memorize. I accepted the assessment and prepared for learners with little or no formal schooling, low literacy levels, and weak fluency in the official language (an artifact of European colonization; most locals grow up speaking indigenous languages). I mentally steeled myself for a demanding experience, anticipating, at best, passivity, and at worst, apathy, both counter-productive to my preferred student-centered teaching practices.
On arrival at the NGO’s facility, the manager introduced me and my travel companions, other volunteers, to the women workers. When she announced I would lead a mathematics lesson, several women started to giggle. Although I understood the laughter was related to the announcement about my visit’s purpose, the conversation was conducted in a local ethnic dialect I could not follow. Later, I had a short conversation with the manager and asked her to explain the laughter. She said the women were excited for the lesson because they had asked for it a few months prior. Some women were unable to understand the calculations on their pay stubs and were pleasantly surprised to see the NGO had responded to their request. This was exciting news. I was not forcing content on unwilling participants—they had specifically requested it!
I began the lesson by presenting an addition example and describing the process. The assistant manager acted as interpreter. As she repeated my words in the local dialect and the four women responded, I quickly learned they would not be quiet or passive, as I had feared. Unfortunately, the translation operated in only one direction; the participants’ enthusiastic comments were not translated back to me. Surprisingly, the women used the official language’s words for numbers so, although most discussion was a mystery, I was able to understand verbalized computations.
The lesson was almost immediately out of my control, in the way educators hope a class will be when learners take ownership of their experience. The women were lively, engaged, and eager to learn. Instead of relying on my explanations, the women justified solutions to each other, and the translator shared her own knowledge. I simply provided exercises and judged correct answers. When the women had all correctly finished a problem, the translator would suggest to me, “another, please,” and we would negotiate whether it was time to increase the difficulty level or switch from addition to subtraction.
To me, the most surprising and impressive aspect of the experience was the women’s collaboration and support of one another. Each would finish her work and then turn to help the others who were still thinking, without ever giving the answer away. Every woman was required to obtain the answer for herself. In planning, I had borrowed glass beads from the NGO’s jewelry-making supplies to use as manipulatives for base-10 arithmetic. When one learner asked, “What is 15 minus 7?” the other women indicated she should use the beads. She then physically counted out 15 beads, removed 7 to achieve an answer of 8, and earned the group’s enthusiastic affirmation. After all the Westerners’ talk about passivity and low skill levels, it was a revelation to see collaboration, engagement, and substantive preexisting knowledge.
This experience reinforced two important ideas for me. First was the value of identifying local skills and resources. I was engaged by the NGO specifically based on my expertise as a mathematics educator but ultimately, my expertise was not my contribution. My presence simply created an opportunity. The content knowledge already existed among the women, including the translator, but they had never before been given the time during the workday to learn mathematics. From this personal experience, my recommendation to the NGO was to give the women a dedicated weekly time to study, resources (e.g., workbooks and pencils), and let the translator continue to facilitate the meetings. By identifying the skills already present, the NGO had the opportunity to build a sustainable workplace education program and demonstrate its commitment to the women, as aligned with its advocacy of fair trade principles and women’s empowerment.
Second, these women were living in an impoverished rural region without access to sustained formal education, but they deserved the same respect and autonomy as any other student group. A student-centered teaching practice creates space for learners to take charge of their own experience. When I let go of my misinformed preconceptions, the women and I were able to share a productive and enjoyable learning opportunity. If I had been teaching in my home community, I would have expected no less. Why then did I so readily accept others’ judgments in this situation?
Reminders for Practice in International and Culturally Diverse Settings
Reflecting on this experience, I was thrilled to see how much the learners already knew, how collaborative they were, and how independent they could be, given the right resources. What I needed to do as a facilitator was create opportunities for them and provide some structure to their work. None of this should have been a surprise and yet, relying only on biased, second-hand information, I was caught off guard by their skills and abilities. This experience reaffirmed my belief that we must ask the learners what they need, not only when it is convenient and not only when learners are like ourselves, but each and every time. For good reason, Vella (2002) identifies needs assessment as the first of her 12 principles for effective adult learning.
A perspective of facilitation rather than transmission is relatively normal in many adult education settings but is perhaps more difficult to see as appropriate when dealing with other cultures and contexts. In particular, it is too easy to think we, as educators and Westerners, need to take charge, favoring our own strategies over existing local resources. Youngman (2005) advocates for materials that “reflect African social realities, theoretical and cultural perspectives, policies, and modes of practice” (p. xiv). If we, as Westerners, wish to help, we must abandon our own inclinations in favor of the expressed preferences and cultural values of those we wish to serve. Guy (1999) describes culturally relevant teaching as the requirement that “adult educators examine the learning environment for communicative processes, instructional practices, classroom norms and expectations, learning evaluation criteria, and instructional content that is potentially culturally incompatible with the learners’ culture” (p. 14). As an example of cultural inappropriateness, I noticed one NGO volunteer taught with materials intended for American elementary-school children, not rural West African women. Dirkx (2006) highlights Vella’s (2002) principles as an important example of a useful practitioner-oriented but research-based framework because each “is couched within a story that reveals its particular context, demands, uncertainties, complexities, and ambiguities” (Dirkx, 2006, p. 284). Such attention to detail is likely to improve the possibility of successful, culturally relevant learning. Had I conducted a proper needs assessment and fully examined the learning environment, perhaps the women and I could have accomplished even more in our time together, and perhaps the NGO’s employees would have adjusted their own perceptions to match, creating long-term benefits for all.
Footnotes
Conflict of Interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biographies
Jill Zarestky is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Her research interests include nonformal and community-based education, art-based learning, and issues of feminism, globalization, and social justice.