Text 14. Expanding Opportunities for Teaching in Practice

(from Teaching in Practice, by Andy Farquharson, 1995)

(1)There appear to be several factors that have contributed to the increasing interest in teaching and the promotion of learning in the human service professions. These include changing conceptions of health and well-being; altered expectations of service users; the rapid expansion in many fields of knowledge; and a new appreciation of experiential knowledge as a complement to scientific and professional know-how. There is a dynamic interrelationship between these factors, and together they have contributed to a profound shift in the conceptualization of the role of human service professionals. This is not a trivial adjustment —it represents a brand new paradigm for constructing the multiple activities of helping professionals. This new perspective reveals a multitude of teaching opportunities, and to the extent that professionals recognize and accept their role as teachers, they can be a key resource in the promotion of individual, group, and community learning.

(2)One aspect of this new paradigm for the human services is that it incorporates a much broader understanding of the concept of health. This new understanding recognizes that health embraces much more than the simple absence of disease. Likewise, this view has broadenedpractitioners' understanding of the impact of stress on their clients' physical well-being; this in turn has heightened their appreciation of theimportance of social supports to buffer the effects of such stress. These understandings are coupled with a greater acknowledgment of the role of public policy in promoting health. Indeed, the term "healthy public policy" is now used to reflect this perspective.

(3)At the same time, there has been an increasing demand from service users to participate more fully in the design and delivery of human services. Several studies conducted over a span of years have documented consumer dissatisfaction with the delivery of humanservices. These criticisms often stem from the class, culture, and gender barriers that interfere with communication between service providers and consumers. To some extent this has been the result of a model of service that was essentially nonreciprocal: one party giving or prescribing and the other receiving. This power of prescription carries with it the possibility of overemphasizing the need for professional intervention. The inherent danger in this situation is also noted by Sarason, who observes that professionals rarely define a problem in terms that do not require their own (professional) presence in order to achieve a solution.

(4)In a related development, human service professionals have also become increasingly aware and accepting of the ways in which laypeople who share physical, social, or psychological concerns can benefit from the kind of self-directed learning that takes place within self-help groups. The understanding derived from inquiry based on technical rationality and the scientific method may be referred to as professional knowledge, while experiential knowledge refers to the understanding extracted from the direct, nonscientific, and unquantified experience of the learner.

Text 15. Foundations of Teaching in Human Service Practice

(from Teaching in Practice, by Andy Farquharson, 1995)

(1) The preceding discussion addressed some of the social trends that have contributed to the developing interest in teaching as a practice intervention. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that teaching is not a new activity in the helping professions—all efforts to promote changes in behavior are ultimately exercises in teaching or the facilitation of learning.

There are at least four fields of practice that lay the groundwork for the current interest in teaching strategies and contribute to the knowledge base for pursuing teaching in human service practice: patient education, health promotion, community education, and professional education.

Patient Education

(2)Patient or client education has for a long time been a concern of the medical professions in general and of nursing in particular. It has been defined by Squyres (1980) as "planned combinations of learning activities designed to assist people who are having or who have had experience with illness or disease in making changes in their behavior [that are] conducive to health".

(3)Much of the early work in this field was concerned with ways to ensure that patients would comply with directives given by helpingprofessionals. In time, however, studies of patient noncompliance contributed to an appreciation of how individual people construct theirunderstanding of wellness, and how this process might be used to help them achieve and maintain the level of wellness their doctors prescribed. A person's "health belief model" (Becker, 1974), or wellness paradigm, came to be recognized as a key variable in determining patient compliance or noncompliance with a professionally recommended health regime. There is a great deal of useful information on this subject in the general patient-education literature. In particular, Becker's health belief model serves as a reminder of the need to be alert to demographic and psychosocial variables that can enhance or impede learning in spe­cific circumstances.

Health Promotion

(4)The field of health promotion developed in part from earlier work in patient education and family life education, but it has expanded to include a concern with healthy public policy and disease prevention. The elusive nature of the concept of health promotion is reflected in the following statement from Health and Welfare Canada (1989): "[Health Promotion] is something quite original, which is not health care, or health education, or health administration, or public health, although all these form part of its lineage. Health Promotion is more than the sum of its parts".

(5)A key milestone in the health promotion movement was the publication of Achieving Health for All: A Framework for Health Promotion by the Canadian government. This document in essence shifted the focus from individual lifestyles to the influence of the environment on health. Its plan for action focused on self-care, mutual aid, and the creation of healthy environments. The first two of these domains rely heavily on teaching and learning processes.

Text 16. Teaching Philosophies

( from Teaching in Practice, by Andy Farquharson, 1995)

(1)In beginning this exploration of the learning process, helping pro­fessionals are encouraged to reflect about the perspective or philosophy they bring to the teaching aspects of their professional practice. What values and assumptions guide your professional decisionsregarding when, what, and how to teach? The importance of clarifying your personal perspective is noted by Stephen Brookfield: "Develop atheory of practice, a critical rationale for why you are doing what you are doing.... Without a personal organizing vision we are rudderless vessels tossed around on the waves and currents of what political whims and fashions are prevalent at the time. Our practice may win us career advancement, but it will be lacking in the innate meaning that transforms teaching from a function into a passion".

(2)The following discussion of two distinct approaches to under­standing and guiding the learning process should illuminate some embedded philosophies about learning that practitioners bring to their teaching. The two approaches are known as positivism (or logical positivism) and constructivism. While they are introduced here as discrete philosophies, it is possible to blend strategies from each approach in developing helpful teaching interventions.

Positivism

(3)Positivism refers to a logical, scientific approach to inquiry, in which hypotheses are tested and conclusions are reached that is irrefutable and can be independently verified. The type of professional knowledge that characterizes the tip of the metaphoric iceberg is most frequently characterized by positivist inquiry.

The basic assumptions that underlie a positivist approach to teaching are that learning needs can be closely determined, learning objectives can be sharply framed, and teaching is always a rational and sequential process. Positivism embraces what Joyce and Weil call a"family" of related theories, including behavior modification and mastery learning.

(4)In positivist teaching the focus of control is primarily the teacher. Teaching is tightly structured, and learning outcomes are stated inbehavioral terms. This type of approach is often characteristic of training programs in business and industry, and it may also be found in the human services in the training of paraprofessionals. As a practice strategy, a more positivist approach may be used by those with abackground in behavioral psychology and in situations in which learning outcomes can be closely specified. Some of the key figures who favorthis type of approach to teaching include Robert Mager, who has written extensively about the form and function of learning objectives, and Robert Gagne, who has influenced the design of numerous training programs. In Chapter One, learning was described as a process of meaning making, involving the active construction of meaning by the learner.

(5)This perspective on the learning process is known as constructivism, it offers a practical way for human service professionals to understand situations that appear to require some kind of teaching intervention. Constructivism proposes that each individual creates or constructs the reality he or she experiences. Mezirow takes a similar approach; he speaks of mediating constructions, or meaning perspectives. He describes them this way: "Meaning perspective refers to the structure of cultural and psychological assumptions within which our past experience assimilates and transforms new experience... They guide the way in which we experience, feel, judge and act upon our situation.... By defining our expectations, it also selectively orders what we learn and how we learn".

Text 17. Stages of Learning

(from Teaching in Practice, by Andy Farquharson, 1995)

(1)Another approach that may help practitioners think about effective teaching is to understand that learners pass through identifiable stages as they learn, becoming increasingly strategic in their thinking. Commonly referred to as levels of cognitive development, these stages can serve as a guide to the way that teaching is calibrated to ensure that it both reaches and stretches the learner.

William Perry is the person who has been most frequently identified with this area of study. In his work on ways of knowing, Perry suggests that students advance through a series of evolving meaning perspectives, or positions, in the course of their intellectual development. He sets out an elaborate scheme of different levels of intellectual development, which can be reduced into three basic categories: dualism, multiplicity, and contextual relativism.

(2)Perry says that at the first level, dualism, learners tend to frame their experience in terms of polar positions: good/bad, right/wrong,us/them. At this level, learners tend to rely on the opinions of authorities to give them "the truth." Over the course of time, however, many learners abandon this dualistic position, as they come to understand that there are multiple perspectives on the nature of truth and goodness. What is most puzzling for learners at this stage of their cognitive development is that these various perspectives often seem to contradict one another. This recognition of the existence of competing authorities necessarily undermines the learner's faith in any single viewpoint, and it may lead the learner to believe that all answers are equally true. But Perry believes that as the learner continues to evolve intellectually, he or she will eventually come to a position of contextual relativism. That is, learners will arrive at the understanding that truth is relative, shaped by a given context and by the particular perspective of the knower or meaning maker.

(3)Stimulated and challenged by Perry's conclusions, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule wrote their own groundbreaking response, derived from their direct experiences with women as knowers. These authors found that Perry's ideas failed to resonate with their own learning experiences as women. They concluded that this was due to the fact that Perry's original study mostly drew on the experiences of a group of privileged male undergraduates at Harvard. In their book, Women's Ways of Knowing, they articulate an alternative model of cognitive development, based on the intellectual journey experienced by women.

(4)There are some parallels between the work of Perry and the con­clusions reached in Women's Ways of Knowing. Belenky and her col­leagues outlined four main stages in their own process of cognitive development: received knowing, subjective knowing, procedural knowing, and connected knowing. Each of these stages in turn embraces several related subcategories. In simple terms, their model suggests that women learners proceed from a state of silence, in which they receive knowledge through the voices of others, toward a state of subjective knowing, in which they begin to listen to their own inner voice and to validate a separate sense of self. In the last two stages, women are seen as having developed their capacity for procedural knowing (after developing skills in systematic analysis and thinking procedures) and then, in turn, their capacity for connected knowing, which enables them to establish contact with the knowledge of others. Finally, these various voices become integrated into what Belenky and her colleagues describe as "constructed knowledge." They describe this as the recognition that "all knowledge is constructed and the knower is an intimate part of the known". In effect, their discussion takes us full circle, back to the earlier exploration of constructivism.

(5)The implication of these theories of cognitive development on teaching in the helping professions is that they underscore the need to individualize teaching methods. That is, it is important to pay close attention to the cognitive position of individual learners in selecting the material to be taught and deciding on the manner in which it should be presented. The aim is to introduce ideas that are understandable and that, given the current cognitive position of the learner, also promote continuing intellectual development.

Text 18. Styles of Learning

(from Teaching in Practice, by Andy Farquharson, 1995)

(1)Another important way in which learners differ from one another is in their individual ways of conducting learning. Learning style has been defined as "the individual's characteristic ways of processing information, [of] feeling and behaving in certain situations ". There is considerable interest in the concept of learning styles, and there are a number of different conceptions of how individuals differ in this regard. These conceptions of learning styles range from the now somewhat questionable distinction between right- and left-brain learning all the way to highly structured models like the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. Many of these newer learning style inventories promise a high degree of precision in measuring individual styles.

(2)Demands of the learning task. A group of child protection workers with learning styles that tended to rely heavily on concrete experience and active experimentation experienced difficulties in learning a new statistical program. This piece of software required close attention to data and comprehension of some fairly sophisticated theoretical con­structs. The staff trainer who was helping them to learn this material recognized that she would need to provide support and strategies for data collection and theory building.

(3)There is a good deal of ongoing research in the area of learning and teaching styles. Practitioners can expect that new findings will help them to be more precise in taking account of individual differences as they plan future teaching interventions. At present, however, there is only an imperfect and often contradictory understanding of learning styles.Cranton's advice is that teachers can simply accept that people learn differently and try to respond flexibly to their diversity.