Chapter 7-The Ecology of Adult Learning

This chapter talked about barriers and incentives to learning and growth.

One of the things that Dr. Daloz says that a mentor needs to do is understand how they can influence the environments that hold students as they grow, and how they can orchestrate the world between the student and the changing world.

Sounds pretty daunting to me.

People are prisoners to the environments they encase themselves in. We feel cozy comfy in our own little worlds. The job of the mentor is to bring students out of their life cozy zone. When this occurs, real growth and development can occur. We can all think of a time when we were inside our comfort zone, and someone asked us to step outside of it. We were tentative at first, and probably a bit upset at the person, but we usually do it. After we do it, we look back and think that it was fun, or you were glad you did it. Just in that little bit, we had a barrier and an incentive to learning and growth. We throw up the barrier (our comfort zone), but let it down, and we gain the incentive (a good time) when we did it.

The main theme here is to get outside your comfort zone, and gain those incentives to learning and growth. We prevent ourselves from learning and experiencing, nobody else does.