Front-Line Facilitating: Negotiating Adventurous Learning within Workplace Programs

This is a study of the professional experiences of instructors within steelmill learning centers called Career Development Programs (CDP). How these facilitators describe the learning outcomes they are charged with creating reveals much about how they regard their own careers and abilities. Deciding what and how to teach is a negotiated process with the learners who derive great voice in the educational centers through instructors' need to impact and retain the voluntary participants. Background of the Study Since educators work in relative isolation, studying their views is necessary to understand their professional actions (Bierema, 2010; Hargreaves, 1992; Nias, 1989a, 1989b). The teachers in this case study were experienced facilitators of learning within non-required workplace education programs. How, and how readily, can learning be facilitated by adult instructors who lack educational credentials'? The CDP educators' job security is based on their ability to satisfy learners directly, rather than upon fulfilling job-specific training goals of managers. The overarching purpose of these instructors' work is "to empower learners to access learning opportunities and realize individual goals" (Rose, Jeris & Smith, 2002). To fail to attract participants and then supply them with satisfying growth ends paid work for facilitators. There is no tenure, ongoing contract, or guarantees of future teaching assignments. Because of the pressure to successfully facilitate learning, CDP instructors' views of the learning being accomplished are key to their professional identities. Brief Literature Review Instructors are the front line of educational programs. They are the personnel, along with the learners, who enact the educational mission. As Lipsky (1980) explains in Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, teachers and other public servants face impossible tasks whenever they are expected to implement the philosophies of boards and program leaders. Since the world is full of differing views on the scope, purpose and desirable outcomes of education, facilitators inhabit complicated contexts and are required to make constant decisions about how to implement program policies. According to Cohen (1988), Americans have traditionally been of two minds about education: while some, including early unions, have fought for mandatory schools characterized by book learning, others have favored romantic Tom Sawyer-like learning by adventure and experience. It was Dewey (1938; 1944) who argued so well for combining real experience and academic learning at school. If instructors are to teach according to Dewey's precepts, they must possess knowledge about experience as well as academic knowledge. They must also understand learning, viewing it as learner constructed rather than passively accumulated by listeners/learners. If instructors' job security within steel mill learning centers is dependent upon satisfying workers who donate/ dedicate their own time to learning, what balance of book learning and experiential or hands-on learning is acceptable? How do facilitators know what level of cognitive challenge or skill difficulty to request? When no grades are assigned and no accreditation test is set as a culminating event--as is often the case in adult education, there can be much negotiation between the facilitators and learners, about what is to be taught and learned. Cohen (1988) claims that "When teachers devise very taxing lessons, they create opportunities for students to make large intellectual leaps forward, and this holds out the promise of great success and satisfaction for all concerned. But such lessons also increase the possibility that students will demur, avoid the challenge, ask for less demanding assignments, resist, or rebel" (p. 28). In adult education settings, pervasive student balking leads to a negative response to the instructor's next proposal for further service. …