Rosaliawong

By examining the possibilities of cultural Education – Education that focuses on the positive aspects of learner culture and uses that knowledge to help learners recreate a world of the image of their dreams – Adult Education strives to achieve within cultural communities the goal of social equality (Guy, 1999)

Why Educators develop Educational strategies that respond directly to the sociocultural environment?

The reasons are:

1. Working towards and addressing the problems of inequality and social injustice.
2. To serve the communities that have marginalized Adult learner populations.
3. To get to know where learners are and with what they know best could help the marginalized population.
4. To get to know learners’ cultural background and setting.
5. The knowledge could enable the Adult Educators to teach learners to take charge of lives. At the same time, learners could make an impact on their communities, and perhaps, the wider society.

Every matter has its’ own difficult issues. With no exception to the practitioners of culturally relevant Adult Education. Guy ruled out a few difficult issues:

1. Most professional preparation in Adult Education ignores the issue of culture as a significant factor in Adult Education programs and services (p.g.97). They need to:

• Re-examine assumptions about learners.
• Imposes their prejudices and biases on learners. For example, terms such as lazy, incapable, unintelligent, unmotivated, and so on.
• Remember to challenge own assumptions, beliefs, and values about who the learners are.

2. Remember that the goal of Education is ultimately to change individuals and the  community. To do that, the practitioners should:

• Avoid encouraging the development of ethnocentric or chauvinistic attitudes among learners.
• Valorising one’s sociocultural perspective at the expense of others is to reverse the dominant-subordinate cultural relationship and subvert meaningful change (p.g.97).
• Need to see themselves as contributing not only to the welfare of their communities but also to the larger society.

3. Guy stated that Adult Educator acts as political agent. At the same time, Adult Educator takes the effort to associate with curriculum, policy, funding program organization, and staffing, as well as relationships with other agencies and serve the target population. The intention is to make clear about program goals and adjectives, does not mean that Educators must run for political office. It does mean, however, that without an adequate political analysis of the sociocultural conditions in which learners exist of the political insights and skill to advocate for learners’ needs and rights, the Adult education practitioner has a limited ability to adequately represent the issues and needs of learners’ or of the program in which he or she works (Guy, 1999).

Reference

Guy, T.C.   1999     Providing culturally relevant Adult Education; A challenge for the twenty-first century. Issue number 82. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Jossey-Bass publication