Customer Reviews

Training Through Dialogue: Promoting Effective Learning and Change with Adults (Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Adult education has been my profession for the past seven years, so I was interested to read this and other books by Jane Vella, highly-recommended by my colleagues. I was quite disappointed: the book is long on theory and short on practical advice. It is also heavily padded with Vella's self-promoting anecdotes in which she overcomes insurmountable problems through her own wit and genius. Within about ten pages I was already annoyed and bored, but I slogged through it because my colleagues had touted Vella as one of the greatest teachers in history. A lot of the theory was interesting but hard to see how practical it would be to actually teach this way: she recommends, a la Paulo Freire, that you vet every lesson with your students to be sure it's what they really want. Sounds time-consuming to me, and I know that many of my students would say, "You're the teacher, you decide!" I do listen to my students' preferences, but for the sake of getting things done, I also make some decisions in the classroom. I don't buy Vella's philosophy that the students must decide everything, although this might work well in some settings.