Steve Kindred stated, “People who step forward at great risk awaken us to the hidden intelligence and courage that we pass every day on the street.”
Key excerpts from Denzell Washington’s Life Advice are: “Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship. Without commitment, you’ll never start…without consistency you’ll never finish.” “Dreams without goals are just dreams…don’t confuse movement with progress…you must apply discipline and consistency…hard work works…It’s what you do with what you have…don’t just aspire to make a living, aspire to make a difference.”
After looking at the short video of Denzell Washington’s Life Advice, and after reading the Handout for this week, “A Sociocultural Perspective on Work-Based Learning…,”present a minimum 200 word discussionon how you think Kindred’s statement in conjunction with Denzell Washington’s advice relate to your venture of gaining academic credit through Prior learning assessment?
Handout Article -A Sociocultural Perspective on Work-Based Learning for the Prior Learning Portfolio Project A Sociocultural Perspective on Work-Based Learning for the Prior Learning Portfolio Project Jessica Kindred, The College of New Rochelle, School of New Resources, New York, USA “... People who step forward at great risk awaken us to the hidden intelligence and courage that we pass every day on the street.” – Steve Kindred, labor activist (2013, para. 3) Introduction The characteristics of work-based learning present challenges to students as well as to those practitioners who support, facilitate and evaluate prior learning portfolio development. Students identifying competencies and learning outcomes from work experiences for the portfolio process revisit these experiences for their educational value. As they circle back to articulate their work experiences and learning for portfolio development, they wrestle with and reveal important differences between conventional classroom paradigms of learning and work-based learning. The portfolio process takes work-based learning as an object of reconstruction, representation and critical reflection. The challenges for prior learning portfolio development involve the unique characteristics of work-based learning. These include the fact that working knowledge is often implicit, rather than explicit; it is often collective and distributed, rather than individually held; and it is embedded in social and material environments, rather than abstracted from them. Portfolio development requires an individuation of the learning typically achieved in collective contexts of work, as well as a reformulation of activity-based knowledge as an object of reflection, reconstruction and typically writing. While traditional colleges are designed to facilitate the transition from school to work, adult education is unique in managing the transition from work into school; this inversion comprises the very opportunity of the PLA process. According to one student’s written evaluation of the PLA process, It allows me to describe the things I have learned at work, and it allows me to let others who may never have experienced dealing with the type of individuals I work with (people with autism) into my world. I also appreciate the fact that someone may think that my work experience and knowledge is valuable. Adult students re-enter the school context with considerable experience and knowledge, much of which re-mains relatively unprocessed. The challenge of harvesting students’ work-based learning for the portfolio process involves supporting the articulation of informal and implicit prior learning, reframing work as a source of development, and cultivating confidence and metacognition in adult students. Underlying all of these is the project of scaffolding students’ self- acknowledgement as knowers, learners and ultimately, teachers. 1 The learning achievements of work are best viewed as “mind in action” (Scribner, 1997) and “cognition in the wild” (Hutchins, 1995). Because of its contextual nature, work-based learning can be productively viewed through a sociocultural model of learning such as that of Lev Vygotsky (1978; 1986). As well as providing a useful framework in which to consider work-based learning and prior learning assessment (PLA), the socio cultural approach reframes the learning done at work toward a realization of its potential in the project of human development (Kindred, 2012). According to Vygotsky, “More than once, Marx demonstrates how labour by itself or large scale industry by itself does not necessarily have to cripple human nature, as a follower of Rousseau or Tolstoy would assume, but, on the contrary, it contains within itself endless possibilities for the development of the human personality” (1994, p. 179). The PLA model as applied to work-based knowledge shares this developmental optimism, suggesting that work can be empowering and productive for the individual beyond the extrinsic rewards of pay and perquisite on the job. Likewise, according to LeGrow’s (2000) re-search, PLA portfolio production has educational benefits far beyond the extrinsic reward of college credit for experiential learning, including the development of knowledge organization skills for students at all levels of work experience. At The College of New Rochelle’s School of New Resources, as at many institutions in which PLA options exist, a course-equivalency portfolio process is facilitated by a 2-credit course, Prior Learning: Theory and Practice. The school has been a leader in adult education and in PLA since the founding of the School of New Resources in 1972. Across the decades, the PLA practice was revised and increasingly limited due to concerns about portfolio writing quality; this included a trend toward centralizing the 2-credit course at only one of the six branch campuses and raising the level of prerequisite English courses. Recent efforts to revitalize the PLA process at the School of New Resources have seen considerable success. Redistribution of the 2-credit course to all six campuses in the boroughs of New York City, alongside retraining of faculty and reduction of English class prerequisites, have resulted in increased student access and a consequent rise in prior learning course enrollment, portfolio submission and PL credit attainment. The college uses a course-match model, whereby students petition for credit by presenting writing and documentary evidence according to the objectives outlined in course descriptions, which includes the option to write a course description and advance it through curricular approval should a relevant course not be found. I am a professor and mentor of prior learning theory and practice at the Brooklyn campus of the School of New Resources. My own previous research was focused on cognitive and cultural change in the industrial workplace (Kindred, 1999; 2005). I am interested in the challenges that adult students face in the transition from work to school and the potential harvest of work-based learning through the PLA process. This paper in-corporates insights from work research with current observations of PLA in action at the School of New Re-sources in order to articulate a sociocultural approach to the elicitation and articulation of working knowledge and the cultivation 2 of metacognition and confidence in adult students in the portfolio development process. Turning Bloom’s Taxonomy Upside Down A deeply held assumption of school-based learning is that there is a proper order to the pedagogical process. In the school context, the introductory course comes first, in which the vocabulary of the field is learned, whereas the application of concepts occurs in more advanced courses. In work-based and experiential learning, in con- trast, knowledge application typically precedes knowledge identification. In the context of getting work done, knowledge is applied more often than named. That is, knowledge is gained in the service of activity, such that learners master the skills of application and evaluation before and often without the lessons of formal nomen- clature. In this sense, work-based learning turns Bloom’s taxonomy upside down and challenges the very structure and architecture of school-based education (Kindred, 2013). A few examples from the PLA classroom may help to illustrate this idea. A person caring for young children, whether as a parent or nanny, may describe the experience of pointing to objects in the world that the child is noticing and providing corresponding words. They may well recognize and describe this as an important aspect of their work activity that promotes the child’s development both linguistically and conceptually. Very likely, though, unless they have read textbooks on the subject of child development, they will not know that this phenomenon has a name and is called “joint attention” by the scholars who study adult-child interaction. “I can explain what I do, but I’m not sure what the name of that is,” said one student, describing her work as a hospital community liaison and peer counselor to the students in the Prior Learning seminar. The term “active listening” emerged to summarize her description of helping others, as it became clear to fellow students that this was the term for her activity. Through the classroom dialogue, terminology was married to practice. Another student, in petitioning for credit for a social science course called Community Organizing, described “house meetings” held in her neighborhood to galvanize support for collective action. Translation to the more formal term of “focus group” involved iterative evaluation of her course narrative against the course description, working within the course-match model of PLA at The College of New Rochelle. Encouraging prior learning students to read about what they know and to review textbooks, glossaries and even course descriptions can help them bring language, framework and conceptualization to their practical knowledge. Similarly, PLA work in concept mapping sometimes entails providing a list of relevant terminology among which students then demonstrate relationships through linkages of varying complexity (Popova-Gonci, 2013). As Vygotsky (1978; 1986) described, such practices set into motion a dialectical dynamic be-tween past spontaneous or 3 experiential learning and new scientific or formal learning that can contribute to conceptual development. This process has bidirectional benefits; names can be identified for practices and concepts, while words also may stimulate the articulation of further narrative development. In experiential learning, the application of concepts is active, while the naming of concepts may be elusive. Bloom’s taxonomy is turned upside down in the case of work-based learning. The sense of knowing without the disciplinary language or even knowing without the words is a typical condition of workers on the job and those who have learned through experience rather than instruction, as they face the task of knowledge articulation for prior learning assessment. Harvesting Work-Based Learning in PLA Learning at work and learning at school are very different processes with different purposes and outcomes, as well as contexts. Work-based learning is embedded in cultural environments and activities, rather than abstracted from them. As Glick (1995) argued, “The shift in unit of analysis from individual to individual-in- structured-environment is a part of the conceptual reconfiguration involved in the perspective of development based on the view from work” (p. 370). The person at work is an actor in the world, a participant in and across activities whose purpose is typically other than learning. Informal learning is a byproduct of work activity, in which the primary goals are productivity and competence on the job. Learning at work is typically learning for work, in which the value of learning is subsumed to the larger goals of profit and productivity. This instrumental quality of practical thinking is