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Do some cultures (and trainers) avoid activity based learning?
3 Comments | Posted by Graham in Learning Design, Learning Experiences, Learning Tools & Resources
I travelled to Vienna last week, and met with a number of trainers from Central & Eastern Europe. I enjoyed our discussions about varying levels of use and application of experiential and activity based learning techniques in various locations. One particular discussion however rather disturbed me – I met a Polish trainer and showed her some of our metaphor-based tools such as Images of Organisations and problem-based activities such as Seeing the Point. She maintained that she did not like any of them and questioned how useful such tools could be in training. My concern was not that she disliked RSVP Design activites but that she seemed to hold such strong personal feelings about what is ‘right’ without even considering what her ‘trainees’ might need or want. How often do trainers let their personal likes and dislikes colour the training material they design and use? Is there a particular cultural reason why experiential or activity-based learning would not be popular in Poland?
3 Comments for Do some cultures (and trainers) avoid activity based learning?
Dave Filipovic-Carter | October 6, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Author comment by graham | October 7, 2010 at 10:08 am
Hi Dave,
I think there is certainly a lot in what you have said here that we recognise. Interestingly my colleague Geoff Cox who has designed and led experiential programmes all over the world with most Nationalities still maintains that Russians are the only cultural group with whom an experiential and metaphorical approach simply does not seem to work! I’m really looking forward to seeing how some of our new research work in Learning Power plays out in Eastern Europe. For example we know that cooperative learning (in terms of what constitutes an important principle in adult learning) may be expected to be welcomed/natural/useful in societies where the Communist values were until recently ‘the norm’. Our experience however is like yours in that in many of these areas, learning is viewed as ‘having an expert tells us about theory’ and generative learning (integrating new knowledge into the structure of old) is not encouraged. I do think it is also part of the evolution of our understanding of learning (theory and practce)- if we look at the way most students are learning in our UK education system, it’s clear we still have a long way to go too!
I’ll look at adding some more on this soon, as my colleagues are running an experientially-led leadership programme in the Czech Republic next week with both Czech and English-speaking staff
Dave Filipovic-Carter | October 18, 2010 at 11:47 am
Graham
I’d be cautious of assuming a communist experience fostered cooperative spirit. It was often quite the reverse! However, more subtlety in analysis may be needed, e.g. in Yugoslavia the concept of ‘brotherhood and unity’ really did run deep. So, despite the consequences of the break-up, there really were strong familial ties that I think can be translated forward into sympathies with cooperative models of learning. Whereas, in more conflictual communist contexts (I’m thinking Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria for example), this is much less likely to be the case. And then of course there were the extreme-dictatorships (Romania and Albania), where the shared suffering at the hands of a simply-identified demon might well, again, lend themselves to a sense of necessary cooperation to survive.
All in all, a fascinating area. I’ll look forward to reading more on the experiences of you and your colleagues.
Cheers,
D.
From the tag-line, I was hoping for much more on this, since this is an area of particular interest to me. I have experience of trying to introduce approaches like experiential learning (problem based learning) into the University context in countries across central and south-east Europe. The experience you had (‘I don’t like these sort of activities’, or its slightly more worrying sibling ‘my students wouldn’t like that sort of approach’) was one I recognise well.
My sense of it is that learning contexts in many former communist countries have not advanced greatly in the years since 1989. Why would they, when the teachers of the teachers were ‘taught’ in a certain way? Also, on top of this there is also a hefty dollop of Western-cynicism (people come from the West – especially the US & UK – and tell us that their way is the best way, but when we look at their politicians, societies, crime rates, etc…)
Of course, I’ve had more successful experiences than the sort I’m recounting here. And the only issue to get over is that of cultural translation, much as one experiences in any culture shift (national, linguistic, sectorial, etc). Indeed, the one culture that you less often have to overcome is that of training-cynicism!
Mind you, if you want real culture clash on methods, you need to get even further east. My all time favourite, from a Russian high school teacher, within the context of a practical session on teaching methodology, who stood up to declare (in a review session after a practical demonstration in which he participated): “That’s all very well in practice, but does it work in theory?” It’s not often I am completely stumped for a response…
Thanks for lots of interesting reads.
Dave.