Building a Culture of Completers by Understanding the Etiology of Adult Learning Deficits Stemming from Childhood

Abstract

Statistics about achievement gaps and college non-completion have been published in journals geared to inform administrators of higher education, such as the Chronicles of Higher Education and publications by the Community College Research Center (see, for example: Bailey, Jeong & Cho (2008). While the focus is usually on cognitive or systemic remedies, many educators and administrators fail to see the connection between psychological development during childhood and college non-completion as one of the possible problems. Chronic exposure to stress hormones, whether it occurs during the prenatal period, infancy, or childhood has long term effects in adulthood learning. While many educators in higher education have spent hours on professional development processes, many shy away from transformational teaching/learning because a certain amount of vulnerability or unfamiliar paradigms are involved. Concurrently, many administrators fail to see the need to inform their faculty about new teaching modalities, such as transformational teaching, and also fail to allocate funding for professional development in this area, whether in the form of in-service learning opportunities or external conference attendance. The authors suggest that both teachers and educational managers at both the college and state levels, particularly at the level of adult education, need to understand the ramifications of Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs on students' ability to learn and adopt an approach to transformational teaching/learning whereby they can help to offset the gloomy statistics in achievement gaps. In transformational learning the educator becomes a facilitator that enables students to learn through activities that are shared by educators and students. This platform has the potential to empower students and educators to re-examine their roles, beliefs, and assumptions, and ultimately helps to reform teaching practice in teaching environments to the benefit of both educators and their learners. Training of educators to adopt a transformational teaching approach can come at the level of each college, but can also come through statewide trainings conducted by educational managers within each State's Department of Education or Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development. Thus, the authors seek to encourage educators as well as educational managers to re-consider their philosophy of teaching from the perspective of transformational theory.