Teaching adult-educators how to bring laughter and creativity to their classrooms

2006-05-18 John Jackson
Originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

John Jackson is a musician in London, and one of the photographers who makes his work available free of charge on stock.xchange, an amazing online photo archive.

All of the images I use in my creativity seminars come from there.

Tomorrow I'm delivering a pretty challenging workshop to a bunch of teachers in Soweto, a suburb south of Johannesburg. The teachers belong to an organisation that educates adults and youth who are not in school.

They've got a whole bunch of schools situated all around Soweto.

My job tomorrow is to help motivate them, and to teach them how to bring fun and creativity into their classrooms.

In South Africa, this type of adult education comes as a result of apartheid. The educational system in the old South Africa was disgustingly aimed at under-educating black citizens, thereby creating a subservient under-class. The people in these schools have had education plucked away from them. Now they want to learn properly.

Phshew.

The picture of John's I'm using illustrates a concept in the section about how adult learners are different from normal school kids. Learning ability changes with the various age-stages of adulthood. John's pic shows a group of Arabic men spanning all the generations.

I offered John a portrait of himself in return for the fact that he so freely gave his photo to the internet community.

This drawing was made using Alias Sketchbook Pro 2.0 on a Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc.