BOOK REVIEW: LEARNING TO LISTEN, LEARNING TO TEACH, BY JANE VELLA.

Reviewed by Thomas Scarborough.

Jane Vella is arguably the world’s leading exponent of modern methods of adult learning. Although this is a secular book, it is relevant to the Christian Church in that several leading theological seminaries have recently adopted its methods.

In Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach, Vella outlines twelve fundamental concepts of adult learning, which she does in an engaging and accessible way.

The thrust of the book is that one needs to work with, or accommodate, adult personality and psychology in order for teaching to be effective. More than anything else, this involves “dialogue” – both between learner and teacher, and learner and learner.

Further, one of the core criteria by which Vella gauges the success of adult learning is whether “energy rises” during the process. Contrast this with so much adult learning, where the onus is on the learner to maintain the energy required to stay the course.

WHAT ARE THE METHODS DESCRIBED IN THE BOOK?

Twelve principles are outlined in the book to “begin, maintain, and nurture the dialogue”. A brief sampling follows:

1) An adult learner comes to the learning process with considerable personal experience and knowledge, and this may be employed to great effect during the course of learning. It becomes a vital learning resource.

2) Adult learners are “co-opted” into the philosophy and design of their own education, helping to determine what it is that needs to be learnt. They are respected as decision-makers in the learning process.

3) The readiness of adults to learn is linked to the developmental tasks of their social r?le. Therefore the learning is designed to be immediately applicable to their daily working environment.

4) It need hardly be said that an adult learner frequently re-enters the learning process after a leave of absence of many years. Therefore confidence-building is built into the learning, and its difficulty is gradually increased with time. At first, group support is emphasised, leading to increasing independence.

WHAT ARE THE WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF “PROCESS”?

The book places a heavy emphasis on the PROCESS of adult learning – so much so that the thrust of the book would appear to be that the method in itself is the key to adult learning. If the method has a suitable shape – so Vella appears to say – then learning is a natural by-product of it: “Ye needn’t worry. They’ll learn in spite of ye!” This raises a number of questions with regard to the wider implications of her method.

To what extent is Vella’s method suited to the teaching of content? She writes, “Our job […] is not to cover a set of course materials.” With this in mind, would her method do justice to the true potential of adult learners? By “adult learning”, does she not mean “adult development”? This does not come clearly into focus.

In practice, Vella’s method would appear to be designed mainly for those with broadly common goals and interests. How suitable would it be where fundamental differences exist within the dialogue group, or between the dialogue group and those excluded from it?

With this in mind, how might the weakness, selfishness, and evil of human nature overshadow the product of open-ended dialogue, particularly if the dialogue tends to be limited by common goals? How would Vella reflect on human nature?

If the teacher is “in real dialogue” as Vella suggests, then how does she remain the teacher? A brief discussion of roles in the book does not seem to answer this. There is the illuminating yet disconcerting example of Vella, “with half a million people’s lives at stake”, being willing to abandon their welfare on a point of authority – a situation which apparently was resolved with a gun.

On a more personal level, I had the feeling that the emphasis on process, with its attendant emphasis on affirmation – “affirmation of every offering” – might be failing in truth, by virtue of its unfalsifiability, to affirm what might be deeply important to me.

DOES VELLA’S METHOD REPRESENT CULTURAL IMPERIALISM?

In the book we see Jane Vella, a woman full of confidence in her own ability and American cultural norms, whirling through remote places with centuries-old traditions, proposing to bring positive “political” change as an integral part of her method.

She states as a matter of principle that “ancient hierarchical relationships” represent “mechanistic thinking” which she rejects with vigour. However, a great many cultures may be summed up in the word “hierarchy”. Having lived in “primitive” society myself, I was taken aback by her apparent disdain for cultural norms which are not in keeping with her own. Although she quotes the need to “reserve judgement” when entering an unknown culture, she does not seem to integrate this fully into her method.

In one of the more revealing examples of the book, Vella speaks of an “appalling polarization” between men and women in a village in Tanzania. She then separates the men from the women, and encourages the women, in the presence of the men, to find solutions “without the men”. Us versus them. No wonder one old man commented, “I could not sleep because of those women”. Yet Vella expresses the hope that this might have represented an affirmation of her methods.

I am uncertain where such cultural imperialism is rooted. Perhaps it is rooted in the presupposition that cultural norms are inherently “intellectual stuff”. This is a luxury of Western civilisation – that cultural norms seem to ride on the back of a well-functioning socio-economic order, and are a matter of choice. This may not be so in more “primitive” cultures. Also, there is a lot that is deceptive to an outsider in traditional cultures, particularly if one should be visiting them on Jane’s Whistlestop Tours Inc.

Synthesis

All in all, Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach is a worthwhile read, and a valuable listing of well-established ways of teaching adults, which are far more likely to bear fruit (at least a certain kind of fruit) than others. Not least, if you should want to know what is happening in theological education today, this book is a “must read”.

The book further gives one the sense of having been understood – that Vella has understood what I have always known was wanting in my own adult education. Perhaps the most powerful argument for her method is made in Chapter 17: “But what if you had not read this book?”

From a specifically Christian point of view, the book served as a reminder that we all have one Teacher, and therefore we have the basis for the ultimate dialogue education in the Church, namely the priesthood of believers.

CITATION OF REFERENCES.

Vella, Jane. Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002. ISBN 0-7879-5967-7. Publisher Price: US$24.

Rev. Thomas Scarborough is the minister of an Evangelical Congregational Church near the centre of Cape Town, South Africa. He is presently studying for a Master’s Degree through Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. During the course of the degree, he needs to report to his professors on some one-hundred books. Hence this review!