I am a Masters student in Adult Education, due to graduate in the Spring of 2020. I started the program in the Fall of 2018. Before that, I had always loved education, but, for some reason, had never considered it as a career or program of study. For all my middle and high school, I studied in a very traditional school in Brazil. I remember feeling constrained by the rigidness of the educational system, longing for a more progressive and humanistic education. I was happy to discover, years later, as I was introduced to Adult Education, that these two values are at the core of the philosophy of the field.
In my first few months in the graduate program, I felt both excited to learn what I was learning and overwhelmed by adapting to graduate school in the United States. Though there are many similarities between American and Brazilian higher education, I soon discovered that there were also enough differences to throw you off. Fortunately, due in no small part to my professors, I was able to surpass that initial learning curve.
Adult Education is, to me, a transformative approach to education. It seeks to change traditional views of education that hold students as passive agents of the learning process and teachers as the sole possessors of knowledge. It takes adults for what they are: self-driven, mature individuals, who are responsible for setting the course of their own lives and, for that reason, should also be responsible for setting the course of their learning.
Curriculum Plan
One of the first courses I took in Adult Education was Curriculum and Program Planning. In that course, we were tasked with developing a plan for a learning project of our choosing. The plan should include, among other things, a needs assessment, a description of the objectives and goals of the project, and a timeline.
My project was a plan for a series of culinary workshops targeted at busy people who are new to cooking. The idea stemmed from my own experience of having just moved out for the first time, juggling household and family responsibilities with studying and working. My proposal was a training program that taught basic skills which could have a variety of real-life, daily applications, as well as easy recipes that could be prepared in under 30 minutes.
This experience taught me much about planning a training program. One of my major takeaways was the importance of having a needs assessment and a clear vision of the goals and objectives before training takes place. Though I didn't know it at the time, outlining this curriculum plan ended up preparing me for facilitating a series of culinary workshops in the future.
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Please click on the image to the right to read the full curriculum plan.
Definition of significant terms & individuals
My very first graduate-level course was Nature of Adult Education, a foundational course in which students get introduced to key ideas, scholars, and trends in that field. The course had a great impact on me. Not only did it show me the who's and what's of Adult Education, it also showed how progressive and transformative those ideas could be.
Towards the end of classes, we were assigned to write about 17 concepts and 5 individuals we had learned about over the course of the semester. The assignment seemed daunting, but it never felt impossible: all of the topics were things we all knew and had discussed extensively. One of the most exciting parts of the writing process was finding and studying the primary sources for each topic. During our classes, we had been given an overview of the important ideas and authors. It was fascinating to get to know those ideas in their original forms, in the words of their authors. Some of these authors include Malcolm Knowles and Paulo Freire, who are pictured on the left, at the top and bottom respectively. I feel a special connection with Freire, a fellow Brazilian who lived in the same city as I did.
Looking back on the finished project, I am grateful for the opportunity to have a written record of that course. It allows me to see how much my colleagues and I -- all of us mostly new to Adult Education -- were able to learn on that semester.
Please click here to read the full project.
Linguistics Poster
I first came across linguistics because of an optional certificate offered by the Adult Education graduate program. It was an English as a Second Language teaching certificate comprised of adult education and linguistics courses. The certificate piqued my interest, which led me to enroll in my first ever linguistics course: Applied Linguistics in Second Language Education.
On that course, we learned about specific areas in linguistics, such as phonology, syntax, and morphology, and their implications for language teaching. For one of our assignments, we were asked to design a and present a poster on the discourse analysis of a conversation between native and non-native English speakers. The topic of analysis could be anything related to what we had learned in class. I chose to do my poster on the differences in the use of filled pauses (such as 'uh' and 'like') between first and second-language English speakers. The posters were then presented in the Auburn Public Library, in an event open to the whole Auburn community.
The experience of designing and presenting a poster was very enlightening to me. I got to learn more about linguistics from my professor, my research for the poster, and my peers who were also presenting that night. Overall, taking Applied Linguistics was very important to me, as it made me realize how much I love linguistics. While considering my future career goals, more and more I find myself inclined to pursue further studies in Linguistics.
Photo: Nicoly Monteiro
