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DR PAT PARTINGTON
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>Last Tuesday, responding to my long item on this topic, Mike Mascolo wrote:
>
>>I wonder if
>>we should be similarly mindful of maintaining our present models of
>>learning in the classroom. What do you think, Devi, of transferring the
>>active learning models of organizations to the classroom? Do you think
>>college students would profit? Or are the conditions of the adult learner
>>not applicable to our present day college students (which would be
>>unfortunate indeed)??
>
>Sorry for the belated response: have been away in Poland until tonight.
>
>Um. Thoughtprovoking. I understand authors such as Novak (1990, references
>in my original item) to be engaging in just these issues; not so much
>transferring organisational models to the classroom, as drawing on a
>rationale for active learning common to both classroom and organisation.
>
>The aspect of the model offered by Beckhard to which I drew attention, the
>political dimension, doesn't at first glance apply to the classroom since
>that aspect of transfer-of-training doesn't apply to learning located
>entirely within the classroom. I guess it's more pertinent in those forms
>of college student teaching in which a work placement of some form is
>involved but, again, only to a degree: the dynamics whereby the teacher
>negotiates the support and involvement of a sponsor who acts as a host,
>within the placement location, of learners coming in from outside, are
>rather different to those in which the "sponsor" is the trainee's own
>employer and organisational committment beyond the level of lip service has
>to be negotiated.
>
>Though the political issue differs, others may be similar, and both
>organisational and classroom settings would seem, _pari passu_, to raise
>the following issues:
>- ownership: how to involve students in the choice and researching of
>personally meaningful issues round which the learning can be structured
>- by analogy to Revans' form of action learning, how to put a given student
>into a situation which s/he hasn't personally experienced but which
>requires him or her to draw on their own personal history and skills in the
>new situation; and how to create a support group or learning set.
>
>Actually, I can think of one very well-developed scheme aimed at
>schoolkids, rather than college students, which has some of these
>characteristics. In the UK and Ireland it's called the "Mini-Company"
>scheme, (and to my embarassment I'm not sure I can recall the American name
>for it, albeit it was first developed in the USA some 50 years ago: "Young
>Enterprise", would it be?)-- in which schoolkids learn enterprise skills by
>forming a legal company operating out of the classroom, raise (modest!)
>capital, and collaborate in developing a product or service which they then
>sell on the open market, all over a semester or two before winding the
>company up and repaying creditors.
>
>Clearly, they learn about business principles and practices, but what's
>more relevant to the present discussion is not so much the subject-matter
>as the mechanisms involved: that the idea of a live task chosen by the
>students, the element of ownership (of an idea and its development), the
>role of the teacher as facilitator of political issues of access, and the
>need for negotiation by the teacher of ways in which the outcomes can be
>taken seriously by key people in the environment.
>
>Laurie Thomas has done a lot of work in this sort of action learning both
>at all levels, school, college, and organisation; and might have something
>to add.
>
>Are you there, Laurie?
>
>Kind regards,
>
>Devi Jankowicz
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