New Students; Fresh Start

I've started teaching Program Planning again with a small group of great students. The first class was about what constitutes adult ed and about the role of the program planner in that larger context. The conversation was rich and varied, and I watched them struggle with their assumptions about adult ed as being a structured, formal, authoritative "product". They made significant moves however towards the idea that adult education/learning is a process, not a product. And that conversation will continue throughout the course.

The link between adult learning as process and the planner's work as "process management" did not yet appear however. That will come. It's a process in itself. Learning is a process; planning is a process; learning about learning is a process; learning about planning is a process! :)

I also had a great conversation with a colleague this week. Not a colleague in the conventional sense, as it's someone I only connect with occasionally. She's a colleague in the sense that we both plan complex programs and struggle with the ethics and politics of programs that we plan. It takes concentration and mindfulness to maintain integrity (reflecting one's values in one's actions) when confronted with strong and potentially opposing forces.

Anyway, she thinks about these things too, and had some interesting ideas about the work of making connections and relationships in planning programs. It struck such a chord with my own ideas about what makes for a good (successful) program planning experience, and how without good process management we fail in planning good programs.

It all makes me think more and more about the ideas that keep rolling around in my head about needing to move to new models of planning programs. If I read the history of program planning, I see progression from Tyler (linear) through Cervero and Wilson (political) to Sork (practical, process-reflective) to Cafarella (organic), but I think it's time we take the next step. Each of the theorists in the past worked from within their times. They looked scientifically at their craft if their world was looking at things scientifically. They saw things politically when post-modernism and the different "-isms" were coming to the fore. They moved to systems approaches when systems theory was big. I think we now need to incorporate the ideas of social networking more firmly.

Last year, I had some delicious conversations with colleagues about connectivism, and I haven't stopped thinking (or writing) about it, although I've done it more privately. However, it keeps gnawing at me, and so I need to be true to that gnawing again and try - again - to come up with a model of program planning that reflects our times now. Not as a theorist, but as a practitioner. We need change in program planning. We need to take what we've learned from Tyler, Cervero and Wilson, Cafarella, and all the others in between, and take the next step. We need to use what we're learning about the online universe to come up with new ways of planning programs and supporting adult learning, in the broadest sense of the word.

Who will I find to join me in the discussion?