Community Learning Development Resource 103-04
OVERCOMING LEARNING BARRIERS WITH EXCLUDED PEOPLE
Summary
How can non-confident, non-intending learners be helped to overcome learning barriers and be enabled to progress? Ideas coming from discussions with community workers.
1. Barriers at entry from first contact onwards, non-confident and inexperienced learners may be helped by:
- Contact and recruitment approaches, which are in keeping with normality and the general life experience of the individual. The majority of non-confident adults are drawn into learning through conversation and in the company of a friend (who can be a worker!)
- Friendship, conversation, comfort, sustenance and encouragement
- Having some awareness and confidence in their own learning skills, abilities and capacity to learn successfully and of the potential of engaging in community learning
- Awareness raising and support to enable them to begin to identify what they want to do
- Awareness of their empowerment and role in choosing and shaping their future
- Knowledge and understanding of learning opportunities – what they are; what they can provide; where and when they are; how they work
- Access via familiar home territory where they feel safe and unthreatened (their comfort zone)
- Individual support provided by a friend or by being within a friendship group
- An initial assessment mode which is individual, learner friendly and non-threatening
- Time to gain self-confidence, understanding and skills, before entering any formal, mainstream or group learning experience
- Physically accessible learning opportunities – neighbourhood
- Conveniently accessible learning opportunities – timing
- Affordable opportunities – including support costs, e.g., childcare, materials
- Ability to deal with negativity towards learning which may exist around them in their family, peer, neighbourhood situations
- Self-esteem to be able to face up to and deal with setbacks and feelings of failure.
2. Progression barriers – when needing to move on, non-confident and inexperienced learners may need:
- Their capacity, competence and confidence confirmed
- Encouragement and a warm welcome
- Informal signposting – advice and information without bureaucracy
- Referral – probably with enabling or advocacy
- Support to progress between different learning experiences – each new situation may be threatening
- Support to move from informal socially supportive learning environments to formal group learning situations
- Support to choose to move-on
- Buddying, hand-holding or the comfort of progression as a learning group
- Support to move from a community venue to an institutional venue
- Support in dealing with the ways that learning changes learners but not those around them – the impact of lifelong learning within families and relationships
- Support and encouragement to move from dependence to independence
- The development of a level of self-confidence to enable them to make a transition, particularly if this means a change of group, location, etc.
- Empathy – non-judgemental feedback and support
- Progression opportunities by the delivery of learning, which does not require a change of venue, etc.
- Feelings of self-worth and self-esteem that sustain them through any setbacks or failure to achieve, and through which they can rationalise these and address them positively, with hope and expectations of future success
- Material help – transport, funding (for fees and/or costs), childcare.
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