Champagne, Marie-France

Walter, Pierre

English

Kansas State University

Kansas State University Libraries New Prairie Press Adult Education Research Conference 2000 Conference Proceedings (Vancouver, BC, Canada) A Bourdieuian Perspective on Differences in Adult Learning Styles: Deconstructing Asian Learners Marie-France Champagne Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand Pierre Walter Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/aerc  Part of the Adult and Continuing Education Administration Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License Recommended Citation Champagne, Marie-France and Walter, Pierre (2000). "A Bourdieuian Perspective on Differences in Adult Learning Styles: Deconstructing Asian Learners," Adult Education Research Conference. https://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2000/roundtables/9 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences at New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Adult Education Research Conference by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact cads@k-state.edu. A Bourdieuian Perspective on Differences in Adult Learning Styles:Deconstructing Asian LearnersMarie-France Champagne and Pierre WalterAsian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, ThailandIn Western educational settings, it is fairly commonto hear Asian adult learners characterized by teach-ers as passive, shy, unwilling to give their opinions inclass, group-oriented and reluctant to challenge theauthority of the teacher. More negative characteris-tics also attributed to Asian learners include adjec-tives like obedient, uncritical, uncreative and evenduplicitous. Following from these traits, the pre-ferred learning style of Asians is often seen as rotememorization, attention to detail, and precise, linearand logical analysis without much creative depth(partly for these reasons Asians are thought to begood at science and engineering). Research onAsian adult learners is still quite sparse. In its ab-sence, popular beliefs about Asian learners continueto hold sway without much critical reflection as totheir accuracy or epistemological roots. Powerfulexceptions to prevailing views of Asian adult learn-ers are Pratt’s (1990, 1991, 1992, 1999) and Little-wood’s (1999) work on Chinese adult learners.Our interest in the topic of Asian learning stylesemerged as a result of our work first, in teacher de-velopment workshops we conducted for Khmer,Vietnamese, Thai and Lao teachers in their respec-tive countries and, second, in our involvement in agraduate Adult Education program we recently es-tablished at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT)for adults working in development contexts in theAsia-Pacific Region. In teaching Asian learners andin designing our Adult Education program, we (aFrench woman and an American man) have con-tinuously grappled with the issue of Western versusEastern educational philosophies, learning styles, ap-propriate roles for teachers and learners, and appro-priate teaching-learning approaches and activities.Although AIT (an international post-graduate insti-tution of engineering, applied science and manage-ment) is intended to be modeled after an Americangraduate institution, many of our faculty are fromNorth America and Europe, and our medium of in-struction is English, in fact most AIT students and amajority of faculty are from Asian rather thanWestern countries. This contradiction has led us toquestion our own assumptions and practices re-garding appropriate adult education: How can webest design and implement educational programsand teach classes for Asian adults? Our approach toteaching adults has been to promote the (Western?)practice of learner autonomy in identifying courseobjectives, content and activities, and to act as edu-cational resources, non-directive (Western?) facili-tators of learning rather than traditional (Asian?)teachers, building on our students’ life, professionaland academic experience rather than our own pro-fessional knowledge as the base for what we do.As a result of our work with Asian learners, wehave begun to explore and critique Western con-cepts and stereotypes of Asian learners, learningstyles and teaching styles together with our (West-ern and Asian) colleagues and the Asian adultlearners in the courses we teach. We have done thismost formally in an adult education course the twoof us co-teach on Teaching and Learning Practices,where we have posed the open-ended question ofwhat characterizes Asian versus Western teachingand learning styles. Among the Nepali, Lao, Thai,Japanese, Cambodian, Tibetan, Sri Lankan andMongolian adult learners who have thus far takenthe course, we have found a wide range of concep-tions of what comprises “Asian” and “Western,”and have begun to appreciate the vast diversity anddifferences among Asian learners and perspectives,to the extent that we no longer find “Asian” to be aparticularly useful concept. Instead, we have begunto talk about different nationalities as a unit of dif-ferentiation, but again, given the great diversity weencounter within nationalities – although we findnational conceptions (e.g. Japanese learners, Thailearners, Sri Lankan Learners) to be quite valuable– nationality appears to be still too general a conceptto completely describe the diversity of beliefs andexperiences narrated by our students. As a result,we have now settled on trying to use the analyticaland conceptual tools offered by Pierre Bourdieu inhis notion of “habitus” to explain learning styles.Habitus disallows dichotomies such as Western ver-sus Asian, and instead posits the individual as lo-cated within many interlocking and overlappingsocial, economic, political and cultural systems (in-cluding nationality) which would explain differencesin learning styles.In brief, habitus describes the system of durableand transportable dispositions of individuals actingwithin and being acted upon by particular “fields”(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Calhoun, 1993; Car-rington & Luke, 1997). Family and school socializa-tion, class, culture, gendered ways of seeing andbeing; the connection of the biological being with thesocial world form and reform habitus, as do thefields through which an individual moves. Fields are“semi-autonomous, structured social spaces char-acterized by discourse and social activity” such asschool institutions, family structures, communitystructures, and academic disciplines (Carrington &Luke, 1997, p. 100).Borrowing Bourdieu’s theoretical orientation, weconceived of a research project beginning with theassumption that learning style and Asian culture aresocial constructions that can be explained in termsof individual habitus. Initially, we had intended toundertake a study of Asian learners involving: (a)administering Kolb’s (1984) learningstyle inventory, first to test our hypothesis that Asianlearners do not have a single “Asian” learning style,but a wide range of different styles, andsecond, to identify learning styles that could then beexplained in terms of different habitus; and (b) afollow-up survey, interviews, case studies and focusgroups to determine habitus. However, after recon-sidering the concept of learning style, with help froma roundtable of our colleagues here and the com-ments and work of one of the sources of inspirationfor the study, Dan Pratt, we have now decided notonly to set aside Kolb’s inventory as a NorthAmerican instrument which would not likely capturethe diversity of learning styles among our students,but also to change the focus of our research fromlearning styles to conceptions of teacher roles, stu-dent roles and the teaching-learning transaction.With this reorientation in mind, we are at this writingdesigning a survey, and interview and focus groupguides to be used with Asian graduate students intheir 1st term at AIT. The survey asks for percep-tions of (a) teacher roles, student roles and theteaching-learning transaction and (b) informationrelated to individual habitus, including family, educa-tional, professional and institutional background,class, nationality, religion, gender, field of study andinternational experience. Current plans are to limit,for various theoretical and practical reasons, the na-tionality of students to Burmese, Cambodian, Chi-nese, Lao, Thai, Vietnamese and Sri Lankan. As thegroup completes their studies (1 year and 6 monthsfrom now), we will again administer the survey, andconduct interviews and focus groups to determinehow learners’ perceptions may have changed overthe time spent in the Western-style learning envi-ronment of AIT.

A Bourdieuian Perspective on Differences in Adult Learning Styles: Deconstructing Asian Learners

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A Bourdieuian Perspective on Differences in Adult Learning Styles: Deconstructing Asian Learners

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