Hayes and Smith: historical figures and their contributions

Hayes and Smith

What do you see as the benefits and drawbacks of studying or talking about learners as groups and studying or talking about them as unique individuals?

More and more scholarly studies reveal the need to approach adult education from a feminist standpoint. This would ensure that the women would be treated equality as the men and that discriminatory actions would seize. This approach is suitable within both groups, as well as at individual levels. To better explain, the measures can be taken at group level when the groups are heterogeneous, such as one group is formed from men and another group is formed from women and the members of each group share similar interests, goals and values. At individual level, the groups are homogenous and can be formed from both males and females, ergo, the need to implement educational programs at both group and individual levels.

Contemporaneous approaches to adult education are presented from various angles, each approach with benefits and limitations. The analysis of the female group within this context has revealed various concepts that had previously been overlooked. Consequently, by analyzing the female as a social and educational group, but also as an integrant part of a group, scholars were able to retrieve new information. They were also able to highlight understudied features as women in groups and as individuals and propose questions for further research.

The primary downside of analyzing adult education from an individual perspective is given by the mistakes which could be made with the generalization of unverified data. Then, analyses of the individual seldom present similarities and continuity overt time. However, the study of students and social members as individuals has the major advantage of taking a closer look and identifying features unfound in other individuals. Otherwise put, the analysis of the individual reveals elements of uniqueness and exceptions to identified rules. Consequently then, it can be said that a benefit of the individual analysis is that it can confirm or refute the information retrieved from group studies.

The study of learners in terms of groups has a main advantage that it takes the group outside its regular sphere and places it in a more dimensional one. To better understand, a group analysis is focused on multiple features, viewed from various perspectives. For instance, the males and females groups of learners can be looked at not only in terms of particularities which give the gender difference, but also in terms of the features which result in different social groups. Another advantage is that the classification into male and female group has led researchers to the identification of other groups, which could be analyzed from various social lenses. These newly emerged groups could be based on race, religion, social class or even ethnicity.

Then, the study of women's groups in adult education programs has retrieved advantages including "the generation of themes and categories specific to literature on women in adult education, the development of a more detailed picture of adult education scholarship on women and a greater understanding of the particular assumptions that guide adult education research and practice" (Hayes and Smith, 1994).