Education and school intimidated me growing up, despite being a curious student who picked things up quickly. Neither of my parents finished high school, nor did their parents (my grandparents). My mother struggled to get to the 8th grade before dropping out, while my father did eventually earn his G.E.D. after dropping out of high school. Both of my parents held such persuasively negative views of formal education that, had I not been surrounded by childhood friends with ambitions beyond our small town in rural Maine, I might also have adopted those same attitudes.

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While the structure of formal schooling alienated my parents, it was a refuge for me. I thrived in an organized classroom and intuitively knew that at home I had to adopt that same structure – or my homework (and thus, my learning and education) would not get completed, as I did not have anyone helping me with study strategies or the work itself.  

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It wasn’t until college that I realized that my parents didn’t hate learning per se. They were actually lifelong learners – just not in the formal way I thought about learning. They were experts in reading clues in the environment that allowed for their survival. Since my mother never had a job, and my father had difficulty holding one down, they learned how to game the system – a system they declared worked against them. They firmly believed that nothing they truly needed to know to live could be taught in a book, and that everything they needed to know to survive could only be acquired through the direct living experience.

 

Needless to say, my early notions of learning were heavily influenced by my childhood environment. Learning was practical, on-the-streets, hands-on information that helped you survive. Nothing more, nothing less. In fact, my family frequently held distain for fancy words or ideas. The message I received my entire pre-college life was: if you can’t explain it in simple words and tell me why the heck I should care and what it has to do with me, I don’t need to know it.

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While there is a bit of hardened, defensive New England attitude in this thinking, looking back now, I can see its brilliance. Without realizing it, my parents imparted one of the core principles of adult learning: just tell me WIIFM (what’s in it for me).

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While my concept of learning as survival-based was deeply ingrained, I found that post-college, I was experiencing a much different lifestyle than that of my parents, one that did not require this survival mindset. Working in a professional office setting in the late 90s (which was my first instructional design job, although I was never referred to as an instructional designer), I became aware that people need to learn on the job, and that this was another kind of adult learning – one seemingly worlds away from the survival-based learning I knew instinctively.

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As a writer and editor of training materials, I had to learn that there were distinct ways of shaping language for adult learners. In addition, it occurred to me that how I presented information made a difference in how digestible it was. In that first ID job, I made a key connection that continues to motivate me to be the best Instructional Designer I can be today – that the training I create can have a direct impact on people’s job performance.

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And while focusing on something like job performance would have seemed “fluffy” to my hard-scrabble family, for many people, one’s job is directly tied to one’s survival.

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Having worked as an Instructional Designer for well over 15 years, I now view adult learning (particularly job training) as on a spectrum – from highly applicable to less applicable. For some learners, as those in my first ID job, training either makes or breaks their job performance. For others, they are taking training only because their manager asked them to and may or may not apply anything they learned. Some training is only peripherally related to a person’s job, while other training is required to ensure everyone’s safety. Some training is designed to improve soft skills, such as leadership and management, while some training is focused on enhancing highly technical skills. I’ve come to believe that the relevance of the training belongs to the learner.

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While I’ve focused on adult learning training in the workplace, it goes without saying that I am by no means discounting adult learning that takes place elsewhere. As I’ve mentioned, survival-based adult learning is in my blood. So, it makes sense that I’ve also sought out other opportunities to support adult learners outside of the workplace.

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About a decade ago, I started teaching English to adult learners of other languages. I’ve learned that every individual in these programs has a unique reason for wanting to learn English as an adult. For some, learning the English language is a survival strategy. It will help them better communicate with their child’s doctor. It will help them get a job or be eligible for a job promotion. For some, it is a way to have an even more robust vocabulary for writing, or it can help them understand literature more deeply. Some students have little to no formal education, while others have several advanced degrees. Some have never worked before, while others are career professionals.

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The diversity I have encountered in the Adult Education program reminds me that there is much more nuance to adult learning than I ever thought. As I scan back through my memories now, I can clearly see my father watching the Nature channel on television, telling me, “you can learn a lot from nature,” or sharing an evocative passage of a Steven King novel, marveling over the author’s no-nonsense turns of phrase. Even such a wizened New Englander as my father would argue that there’s more to adult learners than meets the eye. Just don’t forget the WIIFM.

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