From adult education to lifelong learning through interdisciplinarity and the recognition of the integration and reconstruction of learning
Bob Toynton, University of Sheffield, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of East London
IN common with most UK university providers of part time adult education, the last decade has seen provision at Sheffield evolve from a plethora of unlinked modules to a more focused accredited series of degree tracks within a combined studies framework. A growing number of our students are involved in six years of degree-level study on structured programmes. In addition to the provision of specific study skills, the move to a structured degree programme brings with it, not just the opportunity, but also the responsibility to address the development of the student as a learner. In this sense, the programme should allow and encourage adult learners to become lifelong learners.
The Combined Studies degree consists of a number of named tracks, all with common structures and the occasional module in common. The track considered here leads to the degree of BSc Combined Studies (Natural and Human Environments).
The need to structure the programme to allow learner development is central to this track for two related reasons.
The majority of applicants are amateur specialists, with long standing but often narrowly focused interests within a specific field of archaeology, natural history or geology. Any degree must involve widening this focus and contextualising it. For students of science, and possibly more so amongst adult enthusiasts, the acquisition of knowledge as material has a high priority, whilst knowledge of discourse and epistemology is often unthought of or deemed irrelevant.
Facing a keen amateur archaeologist or palaeontologist with such theoretical issues at level 1 could greatly increase the dropout rate amongst our learners. The challenge is to develop initially specialised adult learners so they will be able to gain from a study of theoretical approaches at level 3, and to develop narrowly focused adult learners into critical lifelong learners.
From adult learner to lifelong learner
The political interpretation of a lifelong learner may be as an active member of the 'learning society': a society 'in which everyone recognises the need to continue in education and training throughout working life' (NCIHE 1997). This is too readily translated into the meaning of lifelong learning. The concept of the learning society is recognition of the engagement of a significant population in an activity. From the perspective of the adult educator, a lifelong learner must be someone empowered and enabled to benefit from the educational opportunities encountered within such a society Therefore I would use as a starting point the assertion that 'academic institutions... will have failed their graduates if they do not empower them to be independent lifelong learners' (Breivik, 2000, p1). Our students may be partaking in part of the 'process' of lifelong learning, but if not enabled to develop information literacy and critical thinking skills, they will not have the potential to become lifelong learners.
If the statement 'thinking of any kind is always 'thinking about X' (McPeck, 1981) is accepted, then critical thinking cannot be taught in the abstract without becoming devalued.
Wallace, (2000, p281) suggests that 'most attempts at tertiary level to teach critical thinking in isolation from specific disciplines involve teaching informal logic', and since 'logic is a product of human thought but not an example or a description of human thought' (Margolis, 1987, p94) then critical thinking can only have value within a discipline context. This analysis leads to the conclusion that for a learner to be truly empowered through critical thinking as a transferable skill, more than one context needs to be encountered. Furthermore the acquisition of this skill must be experiential. Criticality in itself is not enough. Awareness of criticality and what it means within a discipline is more important. Further still, a comparative critical awareness across disciplines leads the learner to the important perspective of 'Helicopter Vision', defined by Candy, Crebert and O'Leary (1994) in terms of the ability to view the approaches, products and processes of a discipline from a detached and comparative viewpoint. Through comparative critical awareness a learner is able to re-examine their learning within one discipline from other perspectives. It is from this analysis that interdisciplinarity becomes important to the development of the lifelong learner at undergraduate level.
Grace (2000, p58) suggests that disciplines 'comprise knowledge depots that incorporate certain methods and reflect the social, cultural and institutional requirements'.
Weiner (1994) writes of the culture of a discipline being built around 'the discursive practices and the nature of the pedagogy'. Interdisciplinarity requires a merging of depots and a synthesis of cultures as well as an awareness of this synthesis. Such a learner-owned construction of an integrated approach to the studies must include reflection on prior understandings, which should lead to orat least allow the reconstruction of knowledge within this new framework of both understanding and thinking.
Creating and detecting moves towards interdisciplinarity
The road to interdisciplinarity is not an easy one. Jones, Merritt and Palmer (1999) report that 'the last Teaching Quality Assessment exercise found that very few environmental higher education programmes actually achieve interdisciplinarity to any meaningful degree in practice.' Within our degree track, many of the learners, being previously 'subject specialists', are initially embroiled within the epistemology, discourses and systems of conventions of a discipline without an awareness of being so. They are already often unwitting members of a knowledge community specific to one discipline. The tutors, though hopefully more aware, are initially no less part of specific and different knowledge communities.
Interdisciplinarity must challenge the participants to justify the validity of the methods and knowledge claims within each discipline. By this process, a broadening of interest can lead to an enhancement of the quality of understanding even within a single discipline.
There are three interdisciplinary modules within Level 2 of our programme and a further three at Level 3. The key modules are 'Interrelationships in the Natural Sciences and Archaeology', which introduces interdisciplinarity at the start of level 2, and 'Theoretical Approaches to the Natural Sciences and Archaeology' within level 3, which aims to make explicit, examine and build upon the experience of comparative critical awareness implicit within the level 2 modules. When confronted with a 'new' study it is important to adult learner confidence that they recognise their ownership of a reservoir of tacit or experiential knowledge they can both exploit and validate (Toynton, 1998). To check that the learners are gaining experiential learning of issues of interdisciplinarity, their responses to the level 2 modules must be examined.
Detecting movement of learners towards interdisciplinarity has been approached through a student questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, an analysis of grades achieved within single discipline areas and evidence for interdisciplinary thinking within written work. The assessment for the first interdisciplinary module comprises a single discipline essay chosen from a discipline new to the learner, an essay involving two disciplines, and an unseen examination comprising discipline-specific questions.
The learners' journey
Moving away from one discipline Twenty-nine anonymous student questionnaires were completed. At the start of the first interdisciplinary course 72% of the learners defined themselves as 'subject specialists', while by the end, 66% identified more closely with 'natural and human environments'. Integral to this move was that 83% felt that their interests had broadened.
Five learners volunteered to be interviewed, allowing them to express their feelings about the programme in their own words. These learners all indicated positive responses to the introduction of new disciplines. After some initial nervousness, attitudes to, and interest in the new disciplines 'snowballed' according to one learner, while more cautiously another 'enjoyed it once I got used to it'.
An interesting pattern emerges from the questionnaire responses to how much each learner felt they had learned of the new disciplines. Those feeling they had learned a great deal about geology comprised 40% of the natural historians and 37% of the archaeologists. Those feeling they had learned a great deal about natural history comprised 33% of the geologists but only 17% of the archaeologists.
This apparent antipathy is returned through none of the natural historians feeling they had learned a great deal about archaeology, while 67% of the geologists felt that they had.
This suggests that the archaeologists and the natural historians felt more connection with geology than with the other discipline, and that the geologists felt a significant connection to both other disciplines. This can be represented in terms of a 'positioning' of the disciplines as: archaeology - geology - natural history with those entering from either end of the sequence perceiving less commonality with the more 'distant' discipline. To test these perceptions against achievement, the grades gained in the unseen examination, where each of the three disciplines were tested in separate equally weighted sets of questions, were analysed. On this measure, 55% of the learners showed a difference in the proportion of their grade gained from their 'strongest' compared to their 'weakest' discipline, of 10% or less. Only three learners, one originally from each discipline, showed a marked imbalance (over 20%) between the three areas. Confidence in, rather than understanding of, the new disciplines appears to be at issue.
Awareness of underlying differences
Evidence of awareness that different disciplines involve distinct epistemologies, and that knowledge claims within different disciplines are based on different values and assumptions, are less easy to identify. That undefined differences exist was expressed in the interviews. One learner found that being introduced to two new disciplines 'unnerved' her at first. Another felt that 'grasping the language of two new subjects' was the main difficulty. A third used the term 'culture shock' in relation to one of the new disciplines. The latter two responses suggest recognition of differences in ways of knowing, rather than content.
The interviews supported the relative 'positioning' of the disciplines in the perceptions of the learners. The strongest views were expressed by an archaeologist about natural history ('seems more like an exact science than archaeology') and a natural historian about archaeology ('I found archaeology woolly'). The positioning suggests implicit learner recognition of differences in epistemology, or at least provides information upon which such interpretations may be constructed at a later stage in the programme.
Integration of knowledge
Evidence for the start of integration and reconstruction of knowledge was sought in the reactions to, and writing for, the first interdisciplinary module. It was made clear the interdisciplinary essay was to be assessed by two tutors from different disciplines. To be coherent, the learners appreciated that, as one stated, 'two essays stuck together would not be satisfactory.' This was not a problem. Rather, there is evidence of other disciplines being used constructively in single-discipline essays, and the third discipline similarly being introduced into the interdisciplinary essay. The learners were aware that irrelevant information or ideas would detract from their grade, and so such insertions can be regarded as positive contributions rather than retreats into the comfort zone of their original interest.
The single-discipline essay natural history and archaeology essays had fairly open questions, and all 14 learners who submitted one of these introduced elements of at least one of the other disciplines. The answers from 4 learners included several paragraphs relating learning from their initial discipline to the new discipline, with a further 6 learners mentioning information from their original discipline within other material. Similarly, a further 4 learners introduced paragraphs from the 'third' discipline (neither their original discipline nor that in which the essay was based), and another 6 made some mention of this third discipline. In all, 9 of the 14 learners included ideas from all three disciplines within their essays in a constructive way, despite the question being located within a single discipline.
Movement towards interdisciplinarity
There is clear evidence that the learners have advanced voluntarily into interdisciplinarity beyond the degree imposed by the structure of the module. A perception of the difficulties of studying new disciplines within interdisciplinarity and of interdisciplinary study itself is detectable, although such difficulties are not reflected in the work submitted. Perceptions of differences within the approaches to the various disciplines are clearly present, though these are not voiced in theoretical or philosophical terms. The realisation of the relevance of other disciplines is clear but unspoken, and support from other learners in terms of structured group work and informal conversations is reported to have been important in this realisation. All of these suggest that the experience is being accumulated which will constitute a resource for the learners when challenged with thinking about these disciplines in theoretical terms at level 3.
The tutors' journey
Tutors can benefit from viewing their own disciplines from new perspectives since most tutors in higher education have reached a high level of formal education within a relatively narrow field. For tutors as well as learners the move to lifelong learning skills through interdisciplinarity can be challenging, and if we are to present modules addressing comparative approaches at level 3, we also must build experience of thinking about our own areas of specialisation in these terms, as well as becoming sensitised to interconnectedness and distinctiveness across the whole area of study.
Prior to the start of this programme there appears to have been differences in the levels of awareness amongst the tutors in terms of how they thought about their own disciplines. The archaeology tutor felt most at ease with reflection on epistemology; the natural historian least. As a geologist interested in educational issues, I felt myself closer to the archaeologist's position. Tape-recorded discussions revealed this to be underlain by a difference in the perception of the contestability of knowledge claims within each discipline. Jones and Merritt (1999), in their work around environmental interdisciplinarity, describe the perceived importance of issues of epistemology, values awareness and 'critical thinking in terms of the contestable nature of knowledge claims' as an important difference between disciplines which must be recognised if interdisciplinarity is to be achieved.