CE3520
Parish Adult Education
Working with Jane Vella's principles for adult learning.
If you click here, you will find a handout (in "pdf" format) that outlines a set of principles for adult learning. If you'd rather have it as a "word" file, click here. Please print it out and then spend some time thinking about each of the principles, and how you've found them expressed in adult learning events/environments in which you've been a participant. These are also good principles to use to critique the event that you went to for your ethnographic observation.
I've left space on the handout after each principle. Please try to write down at least one example after each principle of a way in which you could use this principle in relation to an adult Bible study. Bring the handout with you to class on the 29th. I will collect them from you, collate them, xerox them, and give them back to you so that you have a set of these to use in the future.
If you've used the version I provide above in "word," you can simply list each principle and your example(s) after it, and delete the explanations and other blank spaces.
If you're having a hard time thinking of examples (and I imagine this exercise will be much more difficult to do "in isolation" rather than in small groups in class), I am posting here a chapter of my dissertation that explains how I used the principles in my research there. Starting on page 21, you will find some more examples of these principles in use.
You might also simply print off the handout and sit down with a few friends and go over it!
Last updated November 14, 2001.