2017-11-01
435
«But you’re not a teacher: bridging the divide between adult and teacher education»
Like many other adult educators, my journey to adult education was not a direct or planned one. After high school I enrolled in a three-year hospital-based nursing training program.1 We all lived in residence together and were on the wards from the beginning. In many respects, we grew up together and, as a result of such shared experiences, developed strong bonds of friendship. As Chairs, McDonald, Shroyer, Urbanski, and Vertin (2002) have noted, “A successful cohort is a group of people who work together, provide assistance to each other, find success in their efforts, and simultaneously develop each individual’s talents”.
After graduation I worked for several years as a hospital-based nurse. During and following my training I became increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge hierarchies that organized health care: medical doctors’ knowledge was considered superior to nurses’ practical knowledge; nurses’ knowledge was considered superior to that of other health care workers; health care workers’ knowledge was thought of as better than patients’ and their families’ understandings; and so on. It made more sense to me that everyone involved with care should be included in a partnership model. I found an opportunity to bring this approach to my practice when, for several months, I took over the duties of the patient education nurse who was responsible, among other things, for helping patients with newly diagnosed chronic health conditions. In that job many of my daily encounters involved helping adults to learn. Experimenting with various approaches through trial and error, I found that one principle seemed central to effective teaching and learning – that is, meeting people where they are at and recognizing and building on their knowledge. Later on I would learn that this partnership model was a familiar orientation in adult education.
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Enjoying the focus on learning and working with adults, I sought out other similar positions and learned that these jobs required an undergraduate degree. I applied and entered the third year of a four-year nursing degree program.2 I was part of a small group of returning registered nurses, and we formed a strong bond as we negotiated our way through the nursing program and the wider system of academia. Here again I found that the support of a cohort proved essential to my
survival in an education system that was a very different place of learning compared with hospital-based training. I came to appreciate that my nursing training was a three-year apprenticeship and continue to believe that the best support for adult learning is a combination of classroom-based and experiential learning (see Kolb, 1984). As a mature student I was both excited and frustrated by university. Here again I encountered powerful hierarchies. Within the nursing program, hospital training was regarded as an inferior form of education compared with university education; throughout all my courses, including electives in various social sciences, theoretical knowledge was considered superior to practical knowledge.
After completing my degree I worked for several years as a community health nurse. This was a fantastic, but very demanding, job in which my responsibilities extended from “birth to death.” My duties included providing immunizations, health screening, and health education, including sex education to three schools. Through those school connections, myappreciation for teachers grew. I also saw how schools were important places for building a sense of community. My community nursing also involved home visits to different individuals in my district: new mothers and their babies, families of children from the three schools where I worked, newly arrived immigrants and refugees from Vietnam who had moved into a housing complex, and the elderly who lived in a seniors’ home. I also ran a new mom’s drop-in at a local community centre and, in the evenings, taught prenatal classes.
Community health nursing has changed significantly since then, and community health nurses’ duties are no longer so widely dispersed. Through that work I began to develop a deeper appreciation of community-based practice, what contributed to a sense of community, and the role that lifelong and lifewide learning played in community development. After almost 15 years of working as a nurse in both hospital and community health settings, I began to consider a different career outside the health system. After doing some travelling, I returned to Canada and sought assistance from a women’s centre that provided life and career planning. Intrigued with this centre, I began to volunteer. While there I completed a peer-counselling diploma. I also designed and facilitated various health-related workshops for women. I felt I was getting closer to finding a new career that suited my passions (Betz & Fitzgerald, 1987).
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The challenges faced by women who came to that centre were many, and my attention to hierarchies of power sharpened. Although peer counselling was rewarding, I found the most enjoyment in planning and running various workshops. Recognizing my skill and knowledge limitations in that area, I enrolled in an introductory adult education course. Here I found a name and a professional identity (Steiner, 2013) and a field that valued the diverse contexts of learning with which I had been involved: worksites, universities, schools, homes, housing complexes, community centres, and feminist activism.
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