Teaching Adults

Materials for Teaching Adults: Selection, Development, and Use. John P. Wilson, ed. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 1983. 115 pp. $7.95.

Reading this little paperback is like eating a crisp summer salad.

Its ingredients are fresh, varied, bite-sized, and well-proportioned. Its dressing is light and blends delightfully.

First, its ingredients. Wilson, adult education professor and Extension specialist at Iowa State, selected topics like these:

• Choosing materials that fit adults' learning styles.
• Audiotapes and videotapes for development of mental health professionals.
• Slide sets.
• Designing media for hoped-for attitudinal outcomes.
• Videotapes for community change.
• Using computers to teach problem solving.
• The paradox of an institution developing materials for adults' self-directed learning.
• Materials to help adults assess their own interests, goals, and preparedness.
• Adapting materials to older learners.
• Using materials for adult literacy instruction.
• Evaluating, not the media, but attributesof materials-their pacing, sequencing, time on task, level of organization.

The chapters are short; guidelines are succinct, grounded on both research and the authors' personal experiences.

And other cooks in the kitchen? Well, they include:

• Several professors of adult education.
• A coordinator of audio-visual and television instruction.
• A consultant in international agricultural development.
• An officer in the research division of the Association for Educational Communication and Technology.
• A program developer in a university Extension division.
• A mathematician/computer programmer.
• A pioneer in correspondence studies.
• A psychologist.
• An educational guidance counselor.
• A fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.
• An instructor.
• A curriculum developer.

Wilson concludes the book with a chapter "Where Do We Grow from Here?" For me, it was the dressing that blended all these salad fixin's contributed by all these authors. It reviewed a framework-a rationale-to help us select, develop, adapt, and use materials that, in turn, help adults learn.

The framework prompts us to consider three things simultaneously:

• The content, the subject matter-whether it's about individual learners themselves (as for career exploration, for instance), or relationships among people (such as communication skills), or about one's culture (knowledge accumulated in a given discipline, for example).
• The learner-an individual, a group, a community.
• The method we use to help adults learn: an individual, a group, or a community method.

Wilson concludes: when we survey the growing array of alternative materials, if we can define those three things-content, learner, and method-then we'll more likely use just those materials that, indeed, help adults learn.

This book is CE 17 in the series of Jossey-Bass quarterlies called "New Directions for Continuing Education." A refreshing, nutritious choice of material for our professional growth.