Barriers to Access

Again, our professor asked us to pose ourselves a question, and then to write an annotation of an article that might begin to help us answer the question. This time, I chose to focus on barriers to access. There is an entire body of work, it turns out, related to barriers to access and I can't get through enough of the literature fast enough. It's fascinating, this whirlpool of psychology and sociology and anthropology, of organizational systems, education theory, and policy.

Question: Should Adult Education practitioners concern themselves with participants’ barriers to access to educational activities, especially when those barriers may lie within the scope of social services?

Tilleczek, K., & Campbell, V. (2013). Barriers to youth literacy: Sociological and Canadian insights. Language and Literacy, 15(2), 77–100.

Tilleczek and Campbell, of University of Prince Edward Island, write concerning literacy deficits among young adults in Canada and the barriers to access and long-term success low-literacy individuals face as they transition into adult responsibility.  Although there is a body of work describing the level of literacy (or illiteracy, as it were) among Canadian youth, the authors assert that there is little studies of the barriers to literacy.  This paper attempts to address this gap in the literature and “examine how public education and youth literacy service systems must redress youth literacy and how these failures are socially organized” (Tilleczek & Campbell, 2013, p.94).   The authors conducted a review of sociological literature, domestically and internationally, on the topic of youth literacy, educational attainment, and workforce participation.  This review is further informed by interviews conducted with both youth and service providers, with sampling methods designed to account for diversity of experience, which “provided experiences and perspectives on the meanings of literacy and described the way in which they encountered barriers to literacy” (ibid, p. 82).  The final analysis provided by this paper included socio-demographics describing the sample, the common definition of literacy that rose among the interviewees, and the barriers to literacy described.  Indeed, the barriers could be classified into five major categories: culture/social, individual or self, family, work, and school.  From both the literature and the interviews, socioeconomic status, family circumstances, and limited supportive services from the K-12 system seem to be the most prevalent barriers to access and long-term success.  The authors conclude that “youth literacy holds complex and shifting meanings and skill groupings”(ibid., p. 95) and that youth and practitioners alike express value for attainment of literacy skills for long-term success.  The authors continue, “Youth literacy research could move past pathological individual foci on singular measurement which only reports trends… The literature and interviews here demonstrate the need for continued study” (ibid.)  Implied in this conclusion is a call to action to practitioners, that understanding the barriers is not enough, but that a redress of systemic deficiencies must occur within the existing systems.  This article, and this question, is of particular interest to me because my current work in youth and adult literacy is situated within the workforce development context, in the not-for-profit, social services sector.  Its implied call-to-action affirms our unique approach while emphasizing the need for continued scholarly research as the foundation of best practices.

Jack Mezirow

Again, we were asked to profile a figure in adult education history, and this time I chose Jack Mezirow. Like with Freire, I felt he was someone I was supposed to already know about, but that I'd missed him somehow. They probably talked about him in one of the psych lectures I missed, covered him on the pop quiz I missed, the one I had to negotiate with my professor for. I felt that I probably knew something of him then, because I so desperately needed to do well in that class, but promptly forgot him when I realized my professor would drop the lowest quiz grade. (I was still navigating towards andragogy, folks.)

Like with Friere, I was also sad to realize that Mezirow was so recently passed away. I felt I'd truly missed Freire and Mezirow, like I wasted time. I saw Chomsky talk once at Iowa State. He didn't talk about linguistics at all, talked about the war, but I felt connected to the body of knowledge not just by abstraction but by physical proximity. I've come to realize that this feeling, or rather the view this feeling stems from, is a bit dehumanizing. In writing these profiles, I was reminded that Freire and Mezirow were real men who loved their wives and whose wives loved them. This truth tempers my tendency to pedestal these men for their ideas, but instead be thankful for their contributions and be hopeful of what each person can do in their own lifetime.

Jack Mezirow is best known for his work developing the theory of transformational learning.  Mezirow studied Social Sciences and Education at the University of Minnesota, and completed his Ed.D. Degree in Adult Education at the University of California at Los Angeles.  He held a number of positions at a variety of institutions before coming to the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1968.  There, he established and directed the Adult Education Guided Independent Study (AEGIS), which has since been replicated internationally. (“Class of 2003: Jack Mezirow,” 2003)

Mezirow began developing the theory of transformational learning upon his wife’s return to undergraduate studies as an older student.  Prior to this, Mezirow is said to have been heavily influenced by John Dewey and progressive education, Thomas Kuhn and “paradigms”, and Paolo Freire’s conscientization.  Perhaps Mezirow was influenced most notably by the work of Jurgen Habermas, who advocated for the unification of the social sciences, and Roger Gould, who wrote about adult psychological development through analysis of childhood experiences.  After observing his wife’s transformative experience and upon reflecting on his previous influences, Mezirow conducted a study of the barriers and facilitating factors for success for women returning to undergraduate programs.  He identified ten stages of change and presented this work in an article published in 1978 in Adult Education Quarterly, titled, “Perspective Transformation”.  (Levine, 2014)

Mezirow further developed his theory and presented an updated version is his 1991 book, Transformative Dimensions in Adult Learning, adding an eleventh stage, and described the process as perspective transformation rather than personal transformation. (Kitchenham, 2012)  He also included a “more precise constructivist view of transformative learning and argued that ‘meaning exists within ourselves rather than in external forms such as books and that personal meanings that we attribute to our experience are acquired and validated through human interaction and communication’” (Mezirow as cited in ibid, p. 1659).

At Teachers College, he might be most warmly remembered for AEGIS, as the comments in Levine’s in memoriam piece suggest.  AEGIS created space for practitioners across fields to engage the process of transformational learning for themselves and for specific application within their fields.  Levine quotes one of Mezirow’s doctoral students,

“Jack was a romantic, in the sense that he truly believed that if you put people with all those differences in a room, they’d negotiate the powerful differentials of their mindsets and backgrounds and engage in a meaningful dialogue,” says Jeanne Bitterman, Senior Lecturer in the AEGIS program and Mezirow’s former doctoral student. “Our program is still constructed around that outlook, though we’ve learned over the years that it takes expertise to assist those conversations.” (Levine, 2014, para. 17)

Mezirow’s contribution to the field has been immeasurable, not only in that he has served to train leaders and practitioners within the field, but that he has successfully integrated theoretical frameworks across psychology, education, social action, and even human resource development.  His books include Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning (1991), Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood (with Associates, 1990), and Last Gamble on Education (with Darkenwald and Knox, Adult Education Association, 1975). He received the Frandson Award for Outstanding Publication in Continuing Education for Fostering Critical Reflection and the Okes Award for Outstanding Research in Adult Education for Last Gamble on Education. He has authored a number of other works and has worked and consulted for a variety of other organizations as premier scholar and educator in the field of Adult Education.  He passed away in September 2014.

References

Class of 2003: Jack Mezirow. (2003). Retrieved from http://www.halloffame.outreach.ou.edu/2003/Mezirow.html

Kitchenham, P. A. (2012). Jack Mezirow on Transformative Learning. In P. D. N. M. Seel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (pp. 1659–1661). Springer US. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_362

Levine, J. (2014, October 11). Jack Mezirow, who transformed the field of adult learning, dies at 91. Retrieved from http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleID=9698