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LEARNING TO LISTEN, LEARNING TO TEACH
The group will have learned that respect is the most important variable in adult learning. Recruits will then go out to the community for an initial set of meetings. As they try to show respect for the midwestern farmers they meet at the Parent Teachers Association, grange meetings, and county extension seminars, they have the tools for praxis, for analyzing their encounters. Each time they go out, they will notice that their efforts are more professional, more effective. Community people will feel they are being listened to, being heard. That word gets around a Missouri town very quickly! We will have been explicit about the cross-cultural situation here, asking in the training course: How do you spell respect in rural Missouri? The teaching staff will have read and studied a great deal about this modern agricultural society and its current economic and ecological issues. They will have invited learners to spend time at the open market, the shopping mall in town, the library, the city hall, and various organizational meetings, introducing themselves and talking with citizens. Such learning tasks involve ideas, actions, and feelings. When learning tasks involve all three aspects, they work. The new staff of NS will teach the National Service staff they train in the same way, aware that adult learning always involves more than cognitive content; it involves affective and psychomotor activities as well. Throughout the training course, the men and women are fully engaged in learning tasks in their teams in the classroom and in the community. Their engagement is ensured by the immediacy of the learning task, which relates to the immediacy of the course objective that the task is implementing. Without this engagement, learners simply cannot learn. Our job is to design effective achievement based objectives with corresponding learning tasks and materials. When we do this well, we are in fact accountable to the young NS recruits and can assure them that they will learn what we have set out for them to learn. They will know they know at the end of the two-week period. Such accountability is never accidental. It is ensured by design.