Community Learning Development Resource 103 – 10
THE WORKER ROLE REGARDING LEARNERS AND THEIR LEARNING PROGRESS AND PROGRESSION
SUMMARY
A key idea that workers need to take on board, is that people as adult learners should be given every opportunity to broaden their horizons, to gain self-confidence and self-esteem as learners and if they wish, to choose to move on to more challenging or different learning experiences. This idea implies that adult learners who make learning progress may translate this into progression, by leaving the worker, learning situation or agency they are with, for ‘learning pastures new’. This may mean that they leave and go elsewhere, or choose to stop learning or be more occupied applying their learning within their lives or work. Whilst most face-to-face learning development workers see learner progression as a successful outcome, both for the learner and for their work, some organisations and agencies, see learner progression as the potential loss of a member, student or customer.
Learner progression is a fundamental part of adult learning but can be a ‘minefield’.
Widening participation, community learning – individual and collective capacity-building, all require learner-centred approaches, seeking to address learner needs and support learner progression. There are currently a number of difficulties in making the progression framework work for learners:
- Progression routes are made unclear and difficult for learners to navigate when individual learning providers do not work together in coherent joined up ways
- Providers often seek to build progression into their own learning opportunities and develop their curriculum to provide for their students’ progression needs, rather than enable them to move on.. This sometimes leads providers into delivering inappropriate learning opportunities and into competition with other providers, who are already delivering more appropriate provision
- Collaborative curriculum planning arrangements have often proved very difficult to put in place. Providers tend to behave competitively, driven by funding, which rewards recruitment – seeking market opportunities to expand rather than opportunities to co-operate and rationalise the curriculum offer.
Workers and agencies will be challenged by the need to recognise and apply principles of learner-centred empowerment and choice, particularly where such demand-led ideas seem to be in direct conflict with the requirements of any supply-led (‘bums-on-seats’) funding methodology.
FAIR AND JUST PRACTICE – A COMMUNITY LEARNING MISSION
The mission is to engage with small, local, disadvantaged communities
and to support them in:
- Identifying individual and collective learning needs in their communities
- Supporting non-confident, non-traditional learners in engaging with learning opportunities
- Planning and managing learning opportunities for people in their communities
- Using this new capacity to the benefit of their communities
The means by which this mission can be achieved are:
- By supporting individuals into new, small scale learning opportunities, thus building confidence and self-esteem, and enabling them to identify and pursue their own learning needs
- By identifying and making clear the routes available to progressive learning opportunities
- By empowering individuals and the local community to manage their own learning – empowering learners and building sustainability
- By building individual and collective capacity in the local community which will be able to contribute to regeneration and renewal
This mission will be underpinned by:
- A commitment to the voluntary nature of the learner commitment
- A recognition that this development work takes time and that not all potential learners will necessarily go on to more formal opportunities
- The need to offer a range of options to those learners who move on into other opportunities
- A belief in the contribution that learning opportunities of this kind can make to the regeneration of local communities
- A belief in the empowerment of individual learners, and the freedom for them to be able to make informed learning choices, which may include the rejection of any further formal learning opportunities.
PROMPTS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
- How do these ideas fit with your understanding of the nature of capacity-building work?
- Do these ideas fit with your role and that of your agency?