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Immediacy
Rogers is an experienced Peace Corps trainer, so he and I and the skilled training specialist on his staff, Maria Gonzales, sat together to design. I asked that we first design our designing. I wanted time in the impact area, where the staff lived and worked, to meet all the staff and see them in the field. I wanted to read all their reports and get to know their reality so that whatever we taught would have immediate usefulness to them in this critical situation. Only then could we accountably sit down with our seven steps of design to write a draft of the program. I hoped we could have one or two of the field staff work with us on this program. Any educator goes into a situation with a boilerplate of concepts, skills, and attitudes he or she either wants to teach or can teach. A dialogue approach to adult learning does not deny this or judge it as wrong. The operative word is dialogue. These people had called me to El Salvador to teach them what I knew. I knew I could not do that with accountability if I did not first find out what they knew, what their lives were like, how they thought about their work, what they perceived they still needed to learn. Although this dialogue would take place within the two-week training session in a set of learning tasks, some of it had to take place before we even began to design the session. There is a strange paradox I have observed: the more structure there is, the greater chance of spontaneity. Quantum thinking recognizes the universe as a self-regulating system where spontaneity is part of the intrinsic order. I remembered an experience I had with a famous psychologist who held a week-long workshop in the Adirondack Mountains. I attended with great expectation of what I would learn. The first day, however, the 120 participants heard this old man say: “Decide what you want to learn and tell us. As soon as you are ready we shall teach.” It was not a happy two days for me. One hundred twenty men and women cannot design a curriculum for a week’s study from a blank page. I soon realized I had to leave. When I told the learned doctor my plans, he admonished me: “Oh, stay! It is so interesting. It will all come out all right.” That was not
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